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From: Mark Conrad on 15 Nov 2009 13:53 Been trying for weeks to find some sort of USB headset which has a way to adjust the _volume_ of the earphone part of the headset, no luck. Apparently it is a legal liability issue; no one wants to be sued if some dingbat cranks up the volume too high and damages his own hearing. None of the volume adjustments in OS X 10.6.2 or in MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.5 affect the earphone volume of any of my "speech approved" headset microphones. I have email pleas out to several microphone manufacturers trying to resolve this vexing problem. My Strictly Volunteer Work - ------------------- Typically, I use my present headset microphone/earphone in noisy restaurant environments, to demo to medical policy makers that speech recognition can be effectively used in a noisy hospital environment. That works fine, right up to the time when I strap the headset onto them - - - then they complain that they can't hear the text "readbacks" in the headset earpiece, because the ambient restaurant noise is overwhelming the weak earphone volume. I have been receiving complaints that my posts have been way too short, so I will include a typical example of the sort of medical stuff that I dictate in a very noisy restaurant, with absolutely *NO* mistakes in the resulting text that require any sort of text correction. Whoops, let me qualify that. *NO* mistakes in roughly nine out of ten demonstrations, occassionally I accidentally mispronounce a complex medical word, so my accidental mispronunciation gets recorded as a text mistake. My Setup - Two year old MacBook Pro, 4 GB ram ANDREA NC-91 headset, ordinary low cost headset which shipped with one of my software speech apps, I do not recall which one. USB "TELEX" adapter to allow headset to be plugged into USB connector on the MacBook, these typically cost $25 to $50. I think MacSpeech is including these USB adapters in their boxed shipments of MacSpeech Dictate. Regular MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.5 software, $200 Typically, I install the software from scratch, spend ten minutes training it to recognize my particular voice. Next, I "import" three very small files into the MacSpeech app, grand total of 123 KB in size. Purpose of these 3 tiny files is to "educate" the fresh install of MacSpeech to big long medical words which do not come standard in the default MacSpeech software. Then we go to the noisy restaurant for the actual demo. My modest demo dictation below, all dictated using my voice, resulting text is error-free in 9 out of 10 demos. Generally takes 8 minutes for me to "read in" the approx' 600 words of this complex medical jargon, at a sluggish rate of 75 wpm. I could dictate it much faster, however MacSpeech and my present slow hardware tend to develop text errors at faster dictation rates, in complex medical dictation. With "ordinary" words, I can snort right along at dictation rates of 200 wpm without affecting accuracy to any great extent. My demo dictation below, try wrapping your tongue around some of those words :) -------------------- New Surgical Procedure for Ischemic/Functional Mitral Regurgitation: Mitral Complex Remodeling Hirokuni Arai, MD, PhD*, Fusahiko Itoh, MD, Takeshi Someya, MD, Keiji Oi, MD, PhD, Kiyoshi Tamura, MD, PhD, Hiroyuki Tanaka, MD, PhD Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Tokyo Medical and Dental University Graduate School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan * Address correspondence to Dr Arai, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Tokyo Medical and Dental University Graduate School of Medicine, 1-5-45 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8519, Japan Email: hiro.tsrg(a)tmd.ac.jp On-pump beating heart mitral complex remodeling was performed without aortic clamping. The mitral valve was exposed through a left atriotomy posterior to the interatrial groove. Interrupted 2-0 braided horizontal mattress sutures without pledgets were placed around the annulus to optimize exposure of the subvalvular apparatus. Secondary chords to the anterior leaflet from both papillary muscles were carefully separated from primary chords with a nerve hook and were divided. Two pairs of 5-0 and 4-0 Gore-Tex sutures (W. L. Gore & Associates, Flagstaff, AZ) were each placed to both fibrous portions of the anterior and posterior papillary muscle tips, buttressed with pledgets of autologous pericardium. Two pairs of the free arms of the 5-0 Gore-Tex sutures were twice passed through the free edge of the middle portion of the anterior leaflet about 5 mm from the margin, from ventricular to atrial side. Suture length was adjusted to be the same length as the corresponding marginal chords, and the sutures were tied. Each pair of the free arms of the 4-0 Gore-Tex sutures was passed through the posterior annulus at sites around the border of the lateral and middle portions and middle and medial portions of the annulus, respectively (annulopapillary suture), and was also passed through corresponding sites in the annuloplasty ring (Carpentier-Edwards Physio; Edwards Lifesciences, Irvine, CA). The 26-mm semi-rigid annuloplasty ring was then seated. The annulopapillary sutures were pulled to retract the papillary muscle tips closer to the annulus, to the point at which leaflet coaptation occurred in the plane of the mitral annulus during systole, to visually confirm no residual MR. Suture lengths were determined, and the sutures were tied. To avoid air embolism, a vent cannula with a pressure-monitoring catheter (TOYOBO Co Ltd, Osaka, Japan) was inserted into the left ventricular apex and was connected to the suction circuit equipped with a small reservoir chamber (Senko Medical Instrument Mfg Ltd, Saitama, Japan). During the final adjustment of the annulopapillary suture length, this chamber was filled with blood, and the height of the fluid level of this chamber was adjusted to load the left ventricle. The left ventricular systolic pressure was monitored to keep it slightly lower than the systemic perfusion pressure to avoid ejection through the aortic valve. This new technique has been performed on 3 patients with ischemic/functional MR. The patients were aged 61, 64, and 69 years; their ejection fractions were 0.34, 0.25, 0.32; their left ventricular diastolic diameters were 62, 74, and 79 mm; and tenting heights were 11, 12, and 14 mm, respectively. Preoperatively, all patients showed severe MR; perioperative transesophageal echocardiography showed disappearance of MR. Mitral valvular function has remained stable during a mean short-term follow-up of 6 months (range, 1 to 12 months), with no or trivial MR noted.
From: Mark Conrad on 15 Nov 2009 16:38 In article <151120091427363059%dave(a)N_O_T_T_H_I_Sbalderstone.ca>, Dave Balderstone <dave(a)N_O_T_T_H_I_Sbalderstone.ca> wrote: > How the FSCK did you get through my kill filters, you raving imbecile? Aw c'mon David, don't hold back, tell us what you _really_ think. If you don't pump it up a notch, JR's going to steal all your thunder by default.
From: dorayme on 15 Nov 2009 19:21 In article <151120091053236468%aeiou(a)mostly.invalid>, Mark Conrad <aeiou(a)mostly.invalid> wrote: > Apparently it is a legal liability issue; no one wants > to be sued if some dingbat cranks up the volume too high > and damages his own hearing. Yeah? That does not stop any manufacturers of the equipment that have volume controls like iPods and MP3 players and mobile phones. -- dorayme
From: Mark Conrad on 15 Nov 2009 22:04 In article <doraymeRidThis-8415A6.11214916112009(a)news.albasani.net>, dorayme <doraymeRidThis(a)optusnet.com.au> wrote: > > Apparently it is a legal liability issue; no one wants > > to be sued if some dingbat cranks up the volume too high > > and damages his own hearing. > > Yeah? That does not stop any manufacturers of the equipment > that have volume controls like iPods and MP3 players > and mobile phones. Good point, guess it is not a legal liability issue then. In any event, I hope some of the headset manufacturers inform me of some way to increase the volume in the earpiece. Most likely the guys who make headsets for music _already_ have manual volume controls. Speech recognition headsets are a tiny specialized part of sales, such headsets are optimized for speech frequencies. The dingbat manufacturers likely think that all such headsets are going to be used in a quiet room, therefore do not need any manual volume control. When I am dictating, even complex medical speech as in the example I posted, I usually have the TV blaring away in the background. Mark-
From: dorayme on 15 Nov 2009 22:29
In article <151120091904460954%aeiou(a)mostly.invalid>, Mark Conrad <aeiou(a)mostly.invalid> wrote: > When I am dictating, even complex medical speech as in > the example I posted, I usually have the TV blaring away > in the background. Good idea, you can simulate traffic if you are not near a main road from a separate cassette layer with a recording from a busy freeway, it does not take long to set up. I also like to record dog barks, jack hammers and pipe them not just to the office but to the dining room, toilet, bathroom and bedrooms. It *is* the way to go. -- dorayme |