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Look Who's Talking.(Microsoft, Think3, Autodesk and others)(Technology Information)
SPEECH RECOGNITION TAKES US A GIANT STEP CLOSER TO MORE NATURAL INTERACTION WITH CAD SOFTWARE
most CAD professionals, including myself, have never felt a close affinity for designing things using a keyboard, mouse, or command line. And although attempts have been made to create input devices--such as digitizing pads and 3D controller balls--that more closely mimic natural design tools, none of these devices has ever really taken hold in a big way.
Over the last few years, however, we've seen the emergence of technology that supports speech recognition as part of a computer program's user interface. And lately, CAD vendors have begun to examine the efficacy of incorporating such technology into their software, marking the first step toward a more natural way to interact with CAD applications.
With speech-recognition technology, CAD vendors can tailor their software so that a user can design and engineer a complex product simply by speaking design commands into a microphone. So far, only one leading CAD vendor, think3, is shipping a CAD system that incorporates speech recognition. But as available technologies continue to mature and as existing limitations are ironed out, other CAD software vendors say they will explore the possibility of including such capability into future versions of their products as well.
A Brief History
Speech-recognition technology has been around in one form or another for more than three decades. But only during the past few years have speech engines begun to support the use of speech as an input device.
Until recently, speech recognition was not useful for many tasks because available products suffered from two main limitations. First, despite the technology's relatively limited grammar and vocabulary capabilities, it required CPUs powerful enough to compute the complex statistical comparisons necessary for speech recognition. And second, for similar-sounding words, such as meal and kneel, or words that sound the same but are spelled differently, such as pear, pair, and pare, speakers had to repeat words several times for the systems to understand what they were saying. And even then, a 60-percent accuracy rate was considered good.