CentraLUG, 1 March 2010: Susan Cragin, Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Wine/Linux

[Ted Roche]

The monthly meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, 
CentraLUG, will be held as usual on the first Monday of the month in 
Room 146 of the New Hampshire Technical Institute's Library at 7 PM. The 
topic will be "Speech Recognition on Linux" with a special focus on 
Dragon NaturallySpeaking running on Wine. Susan Cragin will be the 
presenter.

One of the most complex programming tasks has been the development of 
Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR). Companies started to develop it 
only when government funding was available, in the early 1990s. When 
that funding was pulled, the industry shrank and consolidated, and now 
the only two good CSR engines are closed-source and Windows-centric, and 
owned and developed by Nuance Communications. And only one of those 
engines, for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, is still being developed.

But CSR has been shown to be an invaluable resource.

(1) It speeds work and lowers costs, particularly in the medical field, 
which documentation relies on narrative descriptions using complex 
medical terms. In the legal field, certain documents can be drafted 
quickly. In building inspection, notes can be made on-site in narrative 
form.
(2) It assists persons who have trouble typing. It also can prevent 
repetitive strain injuries in the arms and hands.
(3) It can be an aid to learning, and fosters creativity. This is 
something that is only starting to be understood.

Linux needs CSR. Developing its own would take years, but Dragon 
NaturallySpeaking 10 is available now, with blazing speed and accuracy, 
especially considering the overall sorry state of Linux audio. Susan 
Cragin will demonstrate how NaturallySpeaking can be installed using 
wine, how it works and what it's limitations are, and how it can 
interact with native Linux programs. Cragin is a wine Maintainer of 
DNS10 Standard.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=13563

Directions to the meeting can be found at 
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/NHTILibrary. More information 
on CentraLUG can be found at http://www.centralug.org

There will also be time for general Linux and FOSS questions and 
answers. Hope to see you there!

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche&  Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com