The search for a very light speech recognition notebook is far from over. I
have been putting the Sony PCG-505FX through its paces. Encouraged by its
266Mhx processor, 4 gig HD and 64 megs of RAM, small footprint and 3lb.
weight. Unfortunately the soundchip is utterly useless. It should have a
noise-to-signal ratio rather than a signal-to-noise ratio. I am absolutely
sure that Thomas Edison's first attempt at recording produced far better results
than this computer. This a real disappointment from an audio company like
Sony.
I then tried a PCMCIA WaveJammer soundcard. After trying a number of
microphones the only one that began to produce decent results was the Shure
HW505. I was finally able to train up Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional
Edition and was getting quite nice recognition results while plugged in to AC
power. I then attempted to test this unit under a fully charged battery. The
display immediately dimmed and the any hope of either performance or
recognition went right out the window. Apparently the battery is not producing
any where near the same current that the AC does. When the current drops the
computer becomes so sluggish it is useless. I have observed this problem even
when the Wavejammer PCMCIA card is not installed in the computer. It is my
guess that in order to get any time out of the extremely small battery that
they use that they cut the current down rendering this computer virtually
useless. It is possible that this unit may perform better with the unavailable
larger capacity battery. I consider this computer while under battery;
power-starved and well outside the window of performance necessary to support
speech recognition.
Marty Tibor
martytib@synapseadaptive.com
1 Stop Speech Recognition and Adaptive Technology Synapse
3095 Kerner Blvd., Suite S, San Rafael, CA 94901
toll-free 888-285-9988
http://www.synapseadaptive.com
Providers of adaptive and assistive technology solutions.
http://www.unixspeech.com
UNIX, mainframe and Mac speech recognition
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/default.htm
Synapse hosts the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Unofficial Information Pages
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