Salisbury — Jul 29th 2009

The new venue at Salisbury Rugby Club was voted a big improvement for various reasons. Being a smaller venue, the 14 people who attended made the room about two thirds full and as such more cosy than rattling around in the huge science lab of the school. Also, the fact that we have movable tables we can arrange into any format to suit us meant that were weren't in regimented rows, one behind the other. After the formal part of the meeting there was a far greater 'getting together' and general buzz of conversation, perhaps because of the different layout. We also have unrestricted internet access rather than the filtered version at the school. Among other things this means we can now start the joining process for new members on the night. So all in all, it seems a good move.

This means that from now on, we'll move to the rugby club as our venue and we'll also change our meeting day to the last Wednesday of each month rather than the first. This venue doesn't close for school holidays so our next meeting will be the last Wednesday in August - 26th.

As this meeting was primarily for us to assess the new venue, the two demos were kept very short. First up was Macspeech Dictate. This new version is based on the acclaimed Dragon engine and seems to be a huge improvement over previous attempts at speech recognition on the Mac. With very little training (about five minutes) it's already proving much quicker for me to dictate and then correct any errors than to type. It doesn't claim to be able to understand context as we do so could get confused between "ice cream" and "I scream" but it seems to handle "there", "their" and "they're" very well.

The second demo was Personal Accountz, a program which as you may guess from the name is geared at keeping your personal finances in order. It's main focus is ease of use and absence of accounting jargon! There are no templates provided which may look daunting at first but as we all want different analysis of our affairs, it does mean you can set it up exactly as you want it.

Comments

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John Surtees said…

Sorry we had to rush away early Mick. We have very early starts in our household (5.00am). Very interesting demo's - thanks. Macspeech certainly seems a great improvement on the earlier Mac voice recognition programs.

The new venue seems to winner. Just hope they don't expect us to join in any practice sessions out on the field.
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