Plain English Technical Advice

Communicating with your PC—Speech Recognition

For many people, a major barrier to using the PC is the lack of basic keyboard skills.

This may be remedied with training software such as the Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor (various versions, £10-£25 from Amazon) though the problem often arises from a lack of manual dexterity caused by conditions such as arthritis.

Fortunately, after many years of experimentation, the power of the modern PC has turned ‘speech recognition’ into a feasible technology.

Furthermore, modern speech recognition software enables you to dictate in a natural flow rather than Dalek-like pausing between each word.

If you have a recent version of MS-Office, speech recognition is already built in to enable direct dictation into applications such as Word or Outlook.

To improve accuracy, the software can be ‘trained’ to recognise your own voice by reading a number of passages—each training session takes just a few minutes and there are several to choose from.

As with a normal spell checker, you can add to the dictionary if a word is not recognised correctly—the more you use this type of software, the better it performs.

Results are generally improved by using a headset rather than a combination of microphone and computer speakers.

A wireless headset is even more practical and allows for the traditional ’pacing around the office’ while dictating.

In practice, most people will make a few corrections via the keyboard though voice recognition software generally offers a full range of voice commands to control editing.

Personally, I find Microsoft Office speech recognition pretty good but more-demanding users should take a look at Dragon Naturally Speaking which offers a number of advantages including higher accuracy, a range of specialist dictionaries (medical, engineering, etc) and the ability to integrate with a much wider range of software.

www.nuance.co.uk (Dragon Naturally Speaking)

Internet Life—Buying and selling with eBay

I was a rather late convert to eBay whose early aficionados always struck me as rather nerdish.

Although the original concept was along the lines of a high-tech car boot sale, eBay now has a lot of serious full-time traders offering high-quality goods at very competitive prices.

Unlike a traditional auction, the standard eBay listing lasts for a fixed period (1,3,5,7 or 10 days) and the item is won by the highest bidder at the close—The seller can also offer a buy-it-now price which, if accepted, will terminate the auction early.

There are various additional selling options beyond the scope of this article.

Because reputation is everything on eBay and their system of feedback gives a direct indication of customer satisfaction, I generally find that speed of delivery and after-sales service beats that of most big-name retailers.

After every transaction, both buyer and seller have the opportunity to provide feedback (positive, negative or neutral) which contributes to a ‘feedback score’ (positives minus negatives).

This figure, the percentage of positives and recent comments are available for public view and can be used to assess the ‘quality’ of any eBay member.

For entrepreneurial types, it is quite easy to launch a business on eBay which provides access to a market of 100 million members at minimal cost.

There are, of course, various security ‘hoops’ to be gone though—for example, 1-day listings and buy-it-now prices require a minimum feedback score.

To offer valuable Paypal buyer protection requires a minimum feedback score of 50, at least 98% positive—sounds quite impressive but experience makes me inclined to look at the detailed feedback comments if the rating dropped below 99%.

Paypal, by the way, is now owned by eBay and is the favoured method of paying for eBay purchases.

The new seller can, of course, build-up positive feedback through buying though the source of the feedback is quite clear in the public listing—note that multiple transactions with a single eBay member only count once.

www.ebay.co.uk (UK Site)

www.ebay.com (US Site)

Communicating with your PC—Optical Character Recognition

The traditional approach to transcribing large passages of text from paper documents was good old-fashion copy typing—although the ability to scan documents has been with us for some years, the result of the scan is actually an image rather than editable text.

This is no longer an issue because Optical Character Recognition is now a mature software technology which can analyse the image to extract editable text with a very high level of accuracy.

With the Microsoft Office Document Scanner, for example, text recognition is automatic so you end up with the basic image together with a text file which can be saved into Word or some other application.

This feature can be found in the Microsoft Office Tools section, under Microsoft Office on the 'All Programs' menu—this feature is installed as standard with Office 2003 but not with Office 2007 where it needs to be installed separately from the Control Panel.

Omnipage is a rather more sophisticated product whose main benefit is to preserve document layout and produce editable documents which look exactly like the original—ideal for such applications as reproducing forms to be filled in on the computer.

The software can also improve the appearance of poor-quality originals; it recognises a number of languages and can turn the text into an audio file which may be read aloud by the computer.

The recognition of handwriting is still somewhat experimental and the most successful implementations have been on PDA’s (hand-held computers) using special fonts which are written as individual letters.

In fact, handwriting recognition is also built into MS-Office and is best used with a graphics tablet rather than attempting to write with a mouse.

I think that it will be a while before any software can recognise my ‘joined-up’ handwriting.

www.nuance.co.uk (Omnipage)

Internet Life—Send and Receive Payments Online

Paypal, now owned by eBay, is a very convenient method of processing payments over the internet—for most eBay sellers, it is also the preferred method of accepting payment.

Accounts are quick, easy and free to set up though there are various security procedures required to obtain full functionality.

Accounts may be funded using a credit card, debit card or bank account—the principal difference between personal and premier/business accounts is the ability of the latter to accept payments funded by debit or credit card.

Sending and receiving funds are generally free for personal accounts though there are fees for receiving funds into premier/business accounts.

Unlike traditional credit card ‘merchant’ accounts, there are no minimum monthly charges though individual transaction charges may be higher.

Withdrawing funds from Paypal accounts is free for sums over £50.

Until recently, it was necessary to have an account in order to make a credit card payment via the Paypal network—this has now been changed so that the buyer can make the payment and elect to open a Paypal account later.

As terms and conditions change from time to time, do check the web site.

For the premier/business user, there are a number of ’merchant’ tools including the ability to bill customers by email—also, setting up web site payment buttons is extremely easy.

Paypal is ideal for businesses who want to trade on eBay and for those with a fairly low internet sales volume.

I also have experience of using Worldpay (Royal Bank of Scotland Group) whose setup fees and minimum annual charges are offset by lower transaction costs—again, check the current terms and conditions.

Worldpay accounts take a couple of weeks to set up though they claim to accept most applications—They can also work with an existing credit card merchant account if you only need the internet transaction processing.

www.paypal.com

www.worldpay.com