| Page 10 Diablo Blue July, 2002 |
| Added to this release is voice output. I had a lot of fun with this. There are a variety of voice types but the one that was easiest for me to hear was called “Sam.” Sam sounds like Steven Hawking. What is the value of this you ask? If you hold the original in your hands, the voice will read what it has and you can do a word-by-word review of captured information. Sam will not have much of a career as a stand up comic, but he can come in handy. Personally, I doubt that Sam will have a serious place in my OCR activity, when the OCR process is done I have a very high level of confidence that it is correct and the voice read back is a redundant activity. Perhaps future releases will find more for Sam to do. The program supports over 100 languages however, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew are not among them. Conclusion All in all ScanSoft has delivered a product matched to its promise. The product is more accurate than previous releases and is easy to use. As each release improves accuracy, the user productivity soars, I would estimate that productivity improvements of an order of magnitude over previous releases can be realized. What used to take 10 hours of effort can now be done in 1 hour. The more complex the document and the poorer the condition the more work the current program will take on, relieving much of the effort of capturing documents. The program test was a lot of fun to do. The burden of Optical Character Recognition has been lightened. ScanSoft has delivered a significant release and OmniPage Pro release 11 is its name. |
| I have been a subscriber to ExtremeTech’s e-mail services since its inception about a year ago. ExtremeTech is a service of the Ziff Davis group of companies. It provides, at no charge, articles relating to computer and digital technical. Just recently they have added a link to an index of many of the technical articles that have been made available since its inception. This includes over 220 articles and 1.1 million words. This link can be found at www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,41558,00.asp. At the moment it can also be found on ExtremeTech’s home page at www.extremetech.com/ (link to ExtremeTech At A Glance). If you enjoy reading articles relating to computer technology you have got to give this site a try. - - - - - - - - - - - - - The 50 most incredibly useful websites? This might be an overstatement but Yahoo Internet Life has a list of some very interesting websites. To check it out go to: http://eletters1.ziffdavis.com/cgi-bin10/flo?y=aQvR0CzAqI0HHQ0oHR0Ac. I know its a long URL, but that’s the way it was given to me. You can also find a link to this page at www.yil.com |