I just found out that Nuance, the makers of the speech recognition software Dragon naturally speaking, do not offer the software as a downloadable purchase. Seems strange that a product which appeals so much to the disabled would require me to drive somewhere if I needed to purchase it right now.
A few months ago, I fell for a sale at Costco. (This is not an unusual occurence.) The product was a small portable document scanner packaged with software for scanning business cards, receipts, and other business related documents. ( NeatReceipts )
Now the justification was easy. One scanned receipt, that would have otherwise been misplaced, would easily pay for this device come tax time. So it was with much enthusiasm that I purchased the gadget and rushed it home to install my new business process. Some of that enthusiasm was lost when the installed software did not want to load on my laptop. The rest of that enthusiasm was lost when it also would not load on either of my desktop machines. I called tech support in Mumbai, who quickly and diligently went to work on the solution. No small feat I might add. By the end of the “session”, I’d allowed them to install remote software on my machine, log into my laptop, and carefully rearrange my administrative services and registry.
The biggest drawback, it seemed, to their software is that it uses MS SQL Server. Now, I don’t have so much experience with all of the different database packages that I could intelligently discuss the pros and cons of all the major brands (we get along quite nicely on MySQL), but what I do know is that everytime I have a software package which is built on SQL Server, it sucks. And I don’t use that word lightly…they are just plain awful. (Some of the later versions of Act! come to mind.)
Even after the tech support guys got the system working, it was slow, and my laptop started up with a SQL error everytime I rebooted. In general, I lost interest in the software and the little scanner.
But, fast-forward a few months. I’m happy to report that Neat has come out with another service patch for their little software package, and on a lark, I installed it on one of my desktops, and who could have guessed? It worked. Worked great, in fact. Now I’m like a little kid that found a Christmas present long forgot about. I’ve scanned an entire stack of receipts and marveled as the OCR engine grabbed the amount, date, vendor, and a host of other information and neatly (no pun intended) stored it into the database.
