FAQS! FACTS! FAX! 012 (02/07/96)

VOICE OF REASON

I want to purchase a voice-activated word-processor, but which one? I understand there are several systems on the market, and they're all fairly expensive. Which would be the most suitable for a computer illiterate such as myself.

S.D., Essex

A

Voice recognition software has been around for a quite a while but reliability is still a problem. The three leading commercial packages are IBM Voicetype, Dragon Dictate and Kurzweil Voice; prices start at around £650, so choosing the wrong one could turn out to be an expensive mistake.

The fact is none of them are 100% accurate. They all have large vocabularies but they have to be painstakingly taught unfamiliar words. They also force the user to speak fairly slowly, which takes practice, particularly when trying to convey a train of thought. Moreover when they make mistakes, as they inevitably do, exasperation in the users voice can increase the error rate, compounding the problem. Nevertheless they have much to offer if you can't use a conventional keyboard, through injury or disability.

Voice recognition technology is improving all the time, and it should get even better with the computing power available on the next generation of fast Pentiums, but it will be a while before they replace the keyboard as the main input device. Our advice is  -- for the time being at least  -- if you are able to type, stick with it.

It's impossible to say which system would suite you, without knowing more about your requirements and the PC you're using; contact the companies mentioned for more detailed information. Contacts: Dragon Systems, (01242) 678581, Kurzweil AI (UK distributor Responsive Systems) 0171-602 4102, IBM (1256) 343000

OUT OF TIME 

In common with most PCs my newly purchased 486 DX2-66 has a time facility. I am most particular about clocks and watches being correctly set and am therefore surprised to find my PC 'loosing' around 20 seconds per day! The firm who sold it to me told me this is well within tolerance. I find this amazing; my 100 year-old grandfather clock is rarely out by more than 5 seconds a week!

J.P.F., Guildford

A

Errors of a minute or more per day are not uncommon! There are basically two clocks inside an IBM or compatible PC. General time-keeping is controlled by a battery-powered clock chip -- similar to the ones used in digital watches -- this lives on the motherboard. It runs all the time, even when the machine is switched off. Accuracy is generally quite good but they have to operate in a wide range of temperatures, so plus or minus a couple of seconds each day is about the best you can hope for. In any case it's only possible to set them to the nearest second.

The other type of clock, and the one that causes all the problems, exists in the PCs operating software. This only works when the computer is running. It sets itself to the hardware clock when the machine boots up, but thereafter relies on timing signals derived from a programmed interrupt in a BIOS subroutine. Depending on the PCs workload, and the type of software it's running, the timing signals can cause the clock to drift, gaining or loosing over the course of the day.

If you want a higher degree of accuracy -- and this can be important in time-sensitive applications, where critical files or documents need to be precisely time-stamped -- then you will have to install a second hardware clock in your machine, that gets its timing signals from an external source. Clocks that receive time signals over the phone, by radio or teletext data signals exist but they're not very widely available, and they can be expensive. The bottom line is, if you want to know the time, it's probably not a good idea to ask a PC...