Happy 5th Anniversary

Five years ago, the national speech-recognition training program began at NBEA Anaheim, 2000 when Bill Yeager of ScanSoft announced a donation of Dragon to every state and Canadian province. A lot has happened since, as we reflect on the students that keep us motivated to continue the North American speech-recognition training effort.

By Karl Barksdale
Speaking Solutions © 2005

WE'RE HALF WAY THERE -- AND YOU'RE THE KEY

We are coming up on an important anniversary. Five years ago, the national speech-recognition training program began. At the NBEA conference in Anaheim, 2000, Bill Yeager of L&H/Dragon (now ScanSoft) announced his company's intention to donate 15 copies of its latest speech recognition software to the first 15 business educators to be trained in every state and Canadian province across the North American. A massive retraining effort began. To date, 40 states and one province have taken advantage of the donation.

Since Anaheim 2000, a half-dozen states have added speech-recognition standards to their business education curriculum standards: Indiana, Nebraska, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington. The NBEA and its allied organizations have made it a national policy to blend keyboarding, speech-recognition, and handwriting instruction for all students. NBEA has supported this policy by offering pre-conference Dragon NaturallySpeaking training at the five subsequent national conferences in each region of the country. This year, Bonnie Brockman will be teaching an advanced pre-conference Dragon 8 session at NBEA. And to think that five years ago there were no beginners! We've come a long way.

Most importantly, top-tier Dragon NaturallySpeaking instructors -- like you -- are ready and able to teach speech-recognition to everyone. Because of you, we are VERY confident that in the next five years, Dragon NaturallySpeaking and speech recognition will be as commonplace as typing is today.

The NBEA national conference returns to Anaheim in March 2005. This upcoming conference is part anniversary and part watershed moment. It's the halfway mark, the midpoint in the history of speech recognition instruction.

THE STUDENTS THAT KEEP US MOTIVATED

Every now and then we are reminded why we teach speech recognition in the first place. In spirit, our course was charted in the spring of 1997 when a student with cerebral palsy needed an accommodation to compete with all the two-handed typists in the world. Within a few weeks the young man was the fastest typist in school. It became obvious that speech was not just an accommodation for those with special needs, but a tool that could benefit everyone by dramatically increasing their input inefficiency and reducing the risks for computer-related injuries.

Now, the benefits of speech have spread from state to state as instructors teach new speech-enabled ways of working with a computer. Read some of their inspirational stories by clicking this link