Date: Wed, 5 Oct 1994 12:06:40 PDT From: George Hu Subject: Kurzweil Voice To: Multiple recipients of list SOREHAND I am fortunate to have both Dragon Dictate and Kurzweil Voice for Windows, and would like to provide some comparison. It seems that Dragon really dominates this mailing list, possibly due to having multiple dealers on the alias. While Dragon is a very good product which has developed many features which are very useful, Kurzweil has some advantages which everyone should examine. In my opinion, Kurzweil has a much better recognition engine. Out of the box, Kurzweil beats a trained Dragon, and over time it still beats Dragon. When I use Dragon, I find it mistakes words a lot, and often doesn't have the right word in a choice list of 10 words. Kurzweil, however, very rarely makes an error, when it does make an error it is usually on a word which does sound ambiguous, and the choice list of 5 words has the correct word in the list much more often. Dictating this whole document, I probably made less than a dozen errors! Kurzweil is also faster than Dragon on the exact same system. This may be do to Kurzweil still using a specific hardware board whereas Dragon is running off of a Windows sound system card. These two advantages mean that I want to use Kurzweil, but do not look forward to using dragon. Dragon has a much better set of macros and customization. If you intend to do programming, or other non-dictation activities, Dragon may be the only system which can work for you. Dragon allows you to control the mouse and buttons by voice whereas Kurzweil does not. Dragon can read text off of buttons and allow you to speak them whereas Kurzweil only has a few predefined buttons you can say. Dragon allows you to create hierarchical macros and has sophisticated things you can do inside macros such as control spacing and capitalization, Kurzweil does not. Kurzweil is a simpler product to use. There is no command vs. dictate mode. There are no flags for spacing and capitalization you have to set before saying a word. Kurzweil allows you to correct spacing and capitalization afterwards. For correcting errors in previous words, you don't need to enter a special oops mode; you just say " backup 2" or whatever. Kurzweil has a manual of about 70 pages; Dragon comes with three manuals totaling over 315 pages. Kurzweil also comes with many application macros which I have found easier to use than for Dragon, although that probably varies a lot depending upon which programs you run. Eventually, Kurzweil will probably have all the features of Dragon. It will be difficult, however, for Dragon to change their whole engine. Eventually, both these products will be put out to pasture by continuous recognition systems. Today, I think the choice is between recognition accuracy, and features. If you want a dictation system for actual English dictation and moderate application control, then Kurzweil deserves serious attention. If you intend to do programming, or other things which must be highly customized, then you probably need the features of Dragon. Lastly, Kurzweil is retailing at about 1000, which is a bit more than Dragon. Both systems can run on similar platforms, but I think Kurzweil is faster. Sometimes, Kurzweil can require more virtual memory than Dragon, but both are basically memory hogs. I run both on a 66 megahertz 486 with 16 megabytes.