June 13, 1998 Reader Survey Results

hen IBM released Warp 4 to the world, a great deal of noise was made about its built in voice recognition software. For the first time in history, a mass market operating system had such features bundled, and most mainstream hardware could run it "out of the box".

Now, after more than a year of real world testing, we wondered if people were really utilizing this part of OS/2's abilities. To find out, last issue we asked you about "Talking Back to your computer".

Answers to our survey were accepted from June 13th until June 25th. We had a total of 1,030 replies to our questionnaire with 124 "spoiled" entries (replies were considered "spoiled" if they did not contain an e-mail address, if all questions were not answered or if they were duplicates). This left 906 valid replies. The results were as follows:

Do you use VoiceType Dictation?

Arguably one of the most useful features of voice recognition technology is the ability to turn anyone into a "typing champ". With discrete pauses between words, IBM's VoiceType Dictation promises to allow non-typists to create documents at upwards of 100 words per minute -- much faster than most typists can manage. Do OS/2 users take advantage of this feature though? Most of them (64.8%) do not. In fact, of those that replied positively to this question, the majority (31.7%) only use VoiceType dictation some of the time.

Do you use VoiceType Navigation?

Possibly the most gee-whiz feature of OS/2's voice recognition is its ability to recognize "natural speech" to perform simple tasks such as opening a window or saving a file. With this feature too, however, our readers told us they just don't use it. The numbers were very similar here: 66.3% not using Navigation at all and the majority of those who do use it (29.5%) using it only some of the time.

How accurate do you find VoiceType?

Surprisingly, our readers don't seem to be shying away from VoiceType because of a lack of power. A large group of readers (40.6%) told us that they find VoiceType mostly accurate while only 20.5% told us they found it not very accurate or completely inaccurate.

Equally surprising was the fact that although nearly two thirds of readers told us they did not VoiceType functions "at all" in our first two questions, only a little over one third (37.2%) replied to this question with the "I told you, I don't use VoiceType!" option. Apparently the difference in these two groups is made up of people who don't use VoiceType but do have an opinion on how accurate it is.

Is it important for IBM to improve OS/2's built-in VoiceType features?

Again, we were surprised when we asked about readers' interest in future support of VoiceType. Since most people don't use the features, we did not expect to find a great deal of concern for its future. However, you told us just the opposite. Just over three quarters of our readers (75.3%) thing VoiceType improvements are very or somewhat important. Only 15.1% felt it was not important. Clearly IBM has not yet perfected this asset of OS/2 but users don't feel it should be given up on just yet.

That's it for this issue. Don't forget to fill out this issue's questionnaire and check back on July 11th for complete results.

Complete June 13, 1998 Survey Results

Do you use VoiceType Dictation?

Category	Count	Percentage
Yes, all the time	8	0.9%
Yes, most of the time	24	2.6%
Yes, some of the time	287	31.7%
No, not at all	587	64.8%
I do not understand the question	0	0.0%
TOTAL	906	100.0%

Do you use VoiceType Navigation?

Category	Count	Percentage
Yes, all the time	11	1.2%
Yes, most of the time	27	3.0%
Yes, some of the time	267	29.5%
No, not at all	601	66.3%
I do not understand the question	0	0.0%
TOTAL	906	100.0%

How accurate do you find VoiceType?

Category	Count	Percentage
I told you, I don't use VoiceType!	337	37.2%
Perfectly accurate	14	1.5%
Mostly accurate	368	40.6%
Not very accurate	173	19.1%
Completely inaccurate	13	1.4%
I do not understand the question	1	0.1%
TOTAL	906	99.9%

Is it important for IBM to improve OS/2's built-in VoiceType features?

Category	Count	Percentage
Very important	391	43.2%
Somewhat important	291	32.1%
Somewhat unimportant	69	7.6%
Very unimportant	68	7.5%
I am not sure / I am undecided	87	9.6%
I do not understand the question	0	0.0%
TOTAL	906	100.0%

Copyright © 1998 - Falcon Networking

ISSN 1203-5696