Windows™ Speech Recognition Toolkit

Marty you are a little out of date. The term “VSR” didn't exist on 6-20-2008 but has been used quite recently by a number of speech recognition experts and reviewers. We didn't introduce that term. However, we see little point in fighting you over this foolish issue which, in our opinion, no one on this forum cares about so let's just say you're right so that we can end this meaningless quarrel.

We have explained to you why we use the term “Hybrid” on numerous occasions on numerous forums and we seriously doubt you have suddenly forgotten our previous statements. It is unfortunate that you constantly feel the need to engage in these childish high school urinating contests and we are not the 1st competing vendor to publicly mention this to you.

We use the term “Hybrid” to distinguish our microphone from typical music vendors whose microphones will not work out of the box for speech recognition. We additionally include an audio cable with a proper 1/8" plug that is designed to work with computer soundcards. Music stores do not include audio cables with the proper 1/8" plug. We also include our KnowBrainer exclusive step-by-step pictorial manual on how to utilize the Hybrid Samson Airline 77 in DNS and we preset the volume input level to match the client’s soundcard on each unit. We also max out the squelch setting. There are probably a few other minor tweaks that we have forgotten to mention but that is why we use the term “Hybrid”. However, there is also another reason to purchase from our company rather than eBay, music stores or non-Nuance certified vendors and that is when you purchase Speech Recognition Microphones, Digital Recorders and NaturallySpeaking software/utilities from a Nuance Gold Licensed Partner you typically gain you an extra layer of Nuance Certified tech support. You can visit us at http://www.TheMicrophoneStore.com, the #1 vendor of DNS Pro.

KnowBrainer:

Marty you are a little out of date. The term “VSR” didn't exist on 6-20-2008 but has been used quite recently by a number of speech recognition experts and reviewers. We didn't introduce that term. However, we see little point in fighting you over this foolish issue which, in our opinion, no one on this forum cares about so let's just say you're right so that we can end this meaningless quarrel.

Sorry for being out of date. However, if you make undocumented statements like, "The term “VSR” didn't exist on 6-20-2008 but has been used quite recently by a number of speech recognition experts and reviewers,"  I will ask you to point us to the experts and reviewers. I do this because you have a history of distortion and mistruths. For example, on the Dragon Forum Date:07/18/2008 Time:04:13 PM in the thread at:
http://support.lhsl.com/databases/dragon/webdisc.nsf/2b03ac191573b70a85256b09006fc459/EB9BBB7051EF77A78525748A00700A43?OpenDocument
You said, ""We have never been banned by Nuance. You might want to double check your facts or minimally contact Nuance Legal directly before posting misleading information that could result in a lawsuit."

As I believe in truth (whether it be advertising or discussion) I found your own words at:
http://support.lhsl.com/databases/Dragon/webdisc.NSF/UNID/98725ABF9DFD82DE85256D1F005F57E5?OpenDocument
This is where you said:
"ScanSoft is removing all of our postings. Even when we make a posting with no hyperlink and no advertising ScanSoft still removes it and additionally blocks our use of the forum so that we have to change our name. We are currently at KnowBrainer5."

Now you are at KnowBrainer16 but of course you were never banned by the company that developed (Scansoft changed their name to Nuance) Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Also being Gold Certified just means you belong to an organization that sells many boxes of the product and has nothing to do with integrity.

We have explained to you why we use the term “Hybrid” on numerous occasions on numerous forums

See above documentation of your lack of documentation and of your wordy ability to misrepresent or distort the truth as it suits you.

Martin

To gchiu,

What is a 2003VM

sorry, I ran the VM on one monitor and my desktop pc on the other monitor and word2003

soconfused:

What is a 2003VM

Windows 2003 server

 

It's unfortunate but we are not surprised that Martin is once again lowering the tone of an otherwise informative thread with personal attacks. We can appreciate that his company may be struggling to survive but attacking the competition hardly seems appropriate. Nevertheless we will regretfully spend valuable time, that we could be using to answer real questions, responding to Martin’s meritless charges again.

As I believe in truth (whether it be advertising or discussion) I found your own words at:
http://support.lhsl.com/databases/Dragon/webdisc.NSF/UNID/98725ABF9DFD82DE85256D1F005F57E5?OpenDocument

Honestly, Martin, you are like a dog with the bone. You've established your point about VSR versus WSR, so let it go. No one cares who's right and we will concede that you are right if it will shut you up; move on!

We couldn't help noticing that you had to go back 5 years to dig up this dirt. If you want to go back a few more years you'll find that we used to steal cookies from our mother's cookie jug too. We didn't bother explaining this to you last time because we correctly assumed that your EHR Forum attack post would be removed. Unfortunately, this forum puts up with personal attacks so we will have to answer your charges this time but we probably won't waste our time answering your attack postings in the future. We're busy gearing up to release KnowBrainer 2008 and upgrading a mountain of customers to DNS 10.

Speaking of Updates: We haven't been KnowBrainer16 for some time; we are KnowBrainer 2008 and why we changed our name (handle) is our business. No one cares so move on!

The official reason we were given for having our postings removed in 2003 (over 5 years ago) was that we were advertising our company's products (just like you) but the REAL reason why ScanSoft blocked our forum postings is because we made public that you could create macros in the professional version of NaturallySpeaking and use those same macros in DNS Preferred 7.0. As it turned out, this was insider information but we had never been informed by ScanSoft and was unaware that it was proprietary information and not be shared with the public. We were simply trying to help out DNS Preferred end-users because we didn't have a working version of KnowBrainer for DNS Preferred users at that time and we were just trying to help out the end-users who couldn't afford DNS Pro. We made this discovery on our own and got our hand bitten. One executive at ScanSoft felt it would be best if we parted ways but they removed all 6000 of our postings. As you can probably imagine, this person left ScanSoft a long time ago and we are not permitted to comment any more than that but suffice it to say, we were very successful as an independent NaturallySpeaking vendor and gained a lot of respect throughout the speech recognition community; not to mention becoming one of the world's largest NaturallySpeaking vendors. About 4 years ago we were asked to rejoin the Nuance team and we accepted the invitation. That is all there is to it and in case you haven't noticed, the ScanSoft forum became frozen immediately after we had a discussion with Nuance Legal over one of your most recent attack postings where you threaten to sue Nuance. Nice going Marty, now no one can use that forum. Hopefully this move is only temporary while Nuance Legal decides on their next course of action.

Also being Gold Certified just means you belong to an organization that sells many boxes of the product and has nothing to do with integrity.

We don't disagree with this statement per se other than to point out that this is the type of statement that small companies often make when trying to compete with the big boys. HOWEVER, we feel compelled to point out that our company was built from the ground up as specializing in free Internet NaturallySpeaking support. We spent our 1st 3 years dedicating our time to answering speech recognition questions without selling NaturallySpeaking. After establishing ourselves as speech recognition experts, we only then became licensed by DragonSystems and made it official in 1999. We literally built and designed our company by giving away Technical Support and we know very few DNS vendors who were willing to take this approach but our patience paid off and that's how we got our Gold Certification. Although I am now part of a small team, when I 1st reached gold status I was still a one-man operation. Becoming Gold Certified doesn't necessarily mean a company has high integrity, although it can certainly help, but maintaining Gold Certification for several years isn't easy to accomplish when you lack moral fortitude and you can take that to the bank.

See above documentation of your lack of documentation and of your wordy ability to misrepresent or distort the truth as it suits you.

Martin

There's no way to take this statement in any other way than as the personal attack it was intended to be and you've been warned numerous times on this forum and most other forums about these types of statements. Why you continue to risk your forum membership is beyond us. You were even banned on this forum for 24 hours and immediately jumped back on under a new alias and pretended to be someone else. At last count, after being banned from the KnowBrainer Technical Support Forums, for the same type of personal attack, you rejoined approximately 20 times under different aliases. You then went on to spam the forum members by pretending you were a satisfied emicrophones customer and recommended that the forum purchase their microphones and soundcards from emicrophones. This is certainly one of the most underhanded distrustful stunts we have ever seen a vendor pull and before you deny our charges for a change... we have copies of those e-mails and their originating IP address. Think twice before denying this charge.

Your previous attack postings caused you to be banned from 2 of the top 4 speech recognition forums (and at best, you are in hot water on the ScanSoft/Nuance forum) but you seem to have a hard time learning this lesson. If you continue behaving in this fashion you will wind up banned from every forum. We can appreciate that you might be having a difficult time in this economy but taking it out on other vendors really just makes you look bad.

We have thoroughly explained our use of the term “Hybrid” numerous times on numerous forums and if anyone has a problem with it we will be glad to explain it again; move on! 

Considering your own past record of relentless personal public attacks against our company and your insistence on rejoining forums under false aliases after you've been banned, your integrity should be clear to this forum’s members but since you are obviously making a point of bringing our company's integrity into question, perhaps we should reintroduce ourselves to the EMR update community:

1. We are the sole creators of KnowBrainer 2007 (which we 1st created in 1993 and made public in 1996) the world's #1 selling third-party command product for NaturallySpeaking Preferred and higher. Because of the overall success of our company, KnowBrainer is now free to the physically disabled.

2. We donate an enormous amount of personal time to answering speech recognition questions with our best estimate being that we have answered 20,000+ speech recognition questions with nearly 6000 questions answered on the 2nd generation of the KnowBrainer Speech Recognition Forums which we host, pay for out of our own pocket and has the distinction of being the #1 most popular NaturallySpeaking speech recognition forum with up to 76 postings per day.

3. We are #1 in sales for NaturallySpeaking Professional and #3 in overall NaturallySpeaking product sales.

4. We are members of the Better Business Bureau and we are Nuance Gold certified/licensed partners.

5. Part of the profits from our company go to paying for our support forum and software for the physically disabled. For the most part, we are even a green company as we work out of our house (which we're proud of because we don't drive to work or pay to heat/cool a warehouse), use environmentally friendly light bulbs, ALWAYS use recycled packing materials and even print our receipts and manuals on 100% recycled paper.

6. We probably publish more speech recognition/microphone/digital recorder reviews than any other company.

7. Our company is often quoted and interviewed by major microphone companies such as Sennheiser (see interview here) and Andrea Electronics (towards the bottom of page) so we must be doing something right .

If anyone has questions about the ethics or morals of our company they can contact the Better Business Bureau or Nuance directly and if you need further information simply Google our company KnowBrainer or me: Lunis Orcutt. After you are done checking out our company, you might want to Google Martin Markoe of emicrophones or examine his speech recognition credentials. It is an interesting read as it is apparent that we're not the only company whose feathers have been ruffled.

PS: Since Martin began this thread it seems only appropriate that we should end it so we politely recommend closing this thread (which is already too long) so that we can continue focusing our time on helping the members of this forum with their speech recognition related questions rather than wasting our valuable time defending our company. Personal attacks have no value or place on this forum. Let's all move on!

KnowBrainer:

We can appreciate that his company may be struggling to survive

You must be kidding. We are having a banner year. I wish I had time to write lengthy lying diatribes, but sorry, I have a thriving business to run and a real social life to live.

By the way we just leased an additional 600 sq. ft. of storage in our office building on Front Street. We do not work out of a double wide trailer like our "competition" and we have never had a failed business. We have always been Martin Markoe, never Martin Markoe 1 or 16 or 2008.

This thread that you have perverted as an advertisement for KnowBrainer and Dragon Medical is over for me.

Martin

If you say you're having a banner year, that's great. We'll take your word for it. We just assumed you were struggling because of your behavior on this thread and the fact that our business seems to increase every time you're banned from another forum.

It's easy to say that a thread is over when you initiate an attack posting and you get the last word in but we're not going to make it quite that easy. I'm sure we're not alone when we say that your adolescent behavior should be taken off this forum. It's obvious that the numerous warnings from the forum moderators have fallen on deaf ears but hopefully the rest of the members will complain loud enough so that this will be one of a growing list of forums you will no longer be allowed to participate on. It's too bad that you can't learn to play well with others but if you insist on acting like an adolescent than hopefully the forum moderator will treat you like one.

If your last posting wasn't so far off the mark and hilarious we would be offended. Claiming that we work out of a double wide simply reeks of desperation and no one is going to take you seriously. Besides, we really prefer to work out of the back of a 1973 Gremlin. On one of the forums you were recently banned from, you posted a Google Earth zoom of our brick house with 2 garages. We have never seen a brick trailer so this statement is an outright lie. Claiming that we have a failed business also has no merit or place on this forum and is nothing more than a desperate act. I have never had a failed business and speaking of failing businesses... most multi-millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs experience one or more failed businesses so if you're trying to make us look bad, you'll have to try harder because I wouldn't mind being in that click. The rest of us are reading your last posting and laughing at your expense. If you're not struggling to save your business and/or don't have a substance abuse problem than we can't imagine what other excuse you could possibly have to explain this behavior on a public forum. It's hard for any of us to take you seriously when you pretend to be an emicrophones customer and spam forum members under numerous false identities. It wouldn't surprise us if you've used the same tactic here. We are all seriously embarrassed for you and hope that you will have the decency to leave this forum before you are forced out.

Could you two take this disagreement to email? 

Martalli, Nothing would please us more but we have already suggested that this type of discussion be taken off-line twice in this tread and that is has no business being aired publicly but we haven’t been able to convince Martin. When we are attacked publicly we have little choice but to defend ourselves publicly but we regret that this forum doesn't prohibit personal attacks and remove these types of postings.

"Vista is fine for consumers but it's not well suited to professionals and is especially ill suited to the medical community. What we were talking about is accuracy and vocabulary; not commands. We are not recommending against your toolkit but rather against the use of the VSR (Vista speech recognition) in the medical profession because NaturallySpeaking Medical 9 out-of-the-box accuracy should be about 20% higher than the Vista speech engine and Ver. 10, which will be even more accurate, will be coming out in early to mid September. The medical profession shouldn't consider VSR and we 100% customer satisfaction guarantee everything we sell, including software, 32 days from the purchase date. Feel free to compare the 2 products."

I'm just a new user, but there are serious fallacies in the above quote; I must respectfully disagree

A quick visit to more popular Vista speech recognition forums (ex; ms-speech) tells even the casual user that
DNS uses a legacy recognizer, and is (to date) unsuccessful at trying to catch up with Vista's kHz recognizer.
(Dragon samples at a legacy rate of 11.kHz)

Additionally, since WSR "Windows Speech Recognition") is embedded within the OS, approximatly 90 features,
and/or in-box interfaces are available with no :How To" training other than a simple-&-short set of friendly, interactive videos
(because there are so many features) and even includes in-box API's for programs DNS can't work with.

Further, the 10,00 "commands" (IMHO) are lexicons that are US and/or UK English based; with absolutely -0- alternate 2nd-pass
alternatives incorporating foreign accents. And as mentioned before, there are "Train from Selection" where hundreds
of words van be added within (1) quick session, the training learns the user's pronunciations, no matter how deviant they are.

This WSR_Toolkit (which is far advanced compared to the DNS basic macro tool) requires very little training, as well.
I've created complex macros in minutes, macros wholly unavailable inside DNS; it's "Add to Dictionary is easy-to-use,
fast and extremely accurate.

Just out of curiosity;
What's the logic in buying vocabularies that often require word/term/phrase training, regardless of the user's accent
(or non-accent ), doesn't include automatic/down-loadable updates...

And why, for instance, does the "Legal Vocabulary" not include all the phrases & terms found in Black's Law Dictionary .. ??

Trying hard not to be argumentative; but this is rather far-reaching embellishments of truth :
"Vista is fine for consumers but it's not well suited to professionals and is especially ill suited to the medical community"
and flies in the face of well-documented statistics.

Being rooted in the legal industry, newly hired paralegals at my attorneys firm are immediately trained in WSR and as of  late,
then taught how to build and use macros like "Open a civil boilerplate motion for re-hearing", followed by "replace [XXX] with
[XXX] " or "Add [XXX] before [XXX]" --> "Sign for the Firm" --> Print preview --> Print.

Or here's one I hear used often.. "Find all instances of [XXX] || Inside West Law || and copy all to Document 113/Copy all to Wordpad/Notepad".
and "Find and print all per curiam sections that include the words/phrase [XXX]" and or "Copy all per curiam sections that contain [XXX] and
copy them to Document 113/Wordpad/Notepad", etc., etc...

Forgive "my verify all sources" philosophy..
Bit::
Why can I not find KnowBrainer listed as any type of partner, under any category, in the Nuance website...
pray tell?

 

 

We hope you won't be offended by our response but your posting looks a tad suspect being that this is your 1st posting and you are not in the medical profession or a medical vendor. We can't think of any reason why an attorney would suddenly be browsing a medical forum or become a member of a medical forum unless he is partnered with or is an alias for Martin Markoe so pardon us if we take your expertise claims with a grain of salt since you didn't fill out your user profile and we can't seem to find any information on you. Your timing seems a bit suspect.

Clearly we disagree over the accuracy of VSR versus DNS but the members can decide this for themselves because the manufacturers of both these product include a customer satisfaction 30 day moneyback warranty. The EMRUpdate forum members can run their own test and post back with the results.

Just out of curiosity;
What's the logic in buying vocabularies that often require word/term/phrase training, regardless of the user's accent
(or non-accent ), doesn't include automatic/down-loadable updates...

Our previous posting thoroughly explains that Nuance and various third-party vocabularies are not simply vocabularies. They are language models which are vastly superior to a simple vocabulary. It is fairly rare for end-users to need to train medical terms. The “logic” in buying a medical vocabulary is the obvious vocabulary itself and the typical 10% (on average) accuracy increase.

Why can I not find KnowBrainer listed as any type of partner, under any category, in the Nuance website...
pray tell?

If you want to verify our credentials call Nuance and ask for the head of the VAR channel (value added reseller). We believe Marty has the direct number. Unfortunately the Nuance partner website is extremely out of date but we have been promised that it will be updated fairly soon. If you look up the state of Tennessee you'll find a listing for ICP and a Nashville address. KnowBrainer is a Nashville ICP partner (click previous link) but ICP has since changed its name to A Squared Zone. The Nuance partner locator is extremely out of date but KnowBrainer will be listed, as KnowBrainer, within the upcoming weeks but we also find it somewhat suspect that you would bring this up since Martin also frequently brings this point.

 

martalli:

Could you two take this disagreement to email? 

I love these, "Speech Affronts." I just wish I had the attention span to read all the verbiage. Could you, "Gentle Affronters," be more terse for the feeble minded voyeur?

There is one negative to VSR. You cannot use programs like logmein or remote desktop to dictate when away from the office.

soconfused:

There is one negative to VSR. You cannot use programs like logmein or remote desktop to dictate when away from the office.

What kind of audio quality are you getting when logging into your desktop from off-site?