I’ve found Twitter to be a great mechanism for staying up to date on my friends opinions of new products. Today Moshe Yudkowsky “tweeted” that “Redstart has one of the more impressive speech recognition-based systems to control a PC.” So I had to take a look.

First of all, it is wonderful to find an instance where the abbreviation “UC” does not stand for “Unified Communications”. In the case of Redstart Systems, it refers to its flagship prduct “Utter Command“. Redstart’s UC is a set of applets that interworks with Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Together they provide PC users with the ability to use their voices in ways that truly replace keyboards. They provide a consistent set of spoken commands to do such things as open programs, prepare the header and address information for an email (including cc:’s), go directly to a Web site, move a cursor, find keywords or phrases in any program or document and even change tracks in a media player while working in a different program.

The company’s developers based the design to solve problems that PC users encounter every day. For desktop use, NaturallySpeaking can be considered the speech-to-text rendering engine while Redstart enhances with a wrapper of concise commands. The $295 licensing fee may seem a bit steep, with the required Dragon NatruallySpeaking “Pro” already carrying a $625-$900 retail price.

In spite of the steep entry price, we see some real promise in the approach taken by Redstart. It uses Dragon as a “core” speech-to-text rendering engine, which it has proven to be very good at. It then acts as a developer/partner that creates a market for dictation augmentation. We are already witnessing similar partnering structures taking shape in the mobile world. As Igor Jablokov or Yap mentioned to us, in two recent partnership announcements (SHAPE Services GmbH and MyCaption.com) Yap is the speech-to-text rendering engine while the to partners deliver the workflow and scripting that provide a complete solution.

These constant changes, refinements and, ultimately, “mashups” are both the causes and the outcomes of the advent of “Recombinant Telephony”.

Categories: Articles

Tags: user experience, Opus Research, Nuance, Dragon, automated dictation