Talk Your Way Around the Web 
 
by Glenn McDonald, PC World 
April 30, 1998 

 
Star Trek has ruined it for all of us. After all those years of watching
Captain Jean-Luc Picard speak commands directly to the Enterprise computer,
we won't be truly satisfied until we can talk to our computers, too.  

An ambitious little application from Conversá (pronounced conver-SAY) has
brought us all a step closer to the dream. Conversá Web is a speech-activated
browser built around the Internet Explorer 4 engine (you may say that it's a
voice-enabled version of IE). Using a microphone and your sound card, you can
effectively surf the Internet by using natural language voice commands.  

Conversá works by analyzing a loading page and sniffing out all hyperlinks.
The program then recognizes--with a surprising degree of accuracy--any text
hyperlink you read. For example, if you wanted to jump to Today's Headlines
in the navigation bar to your right, you'd simply speak "Today's Headlines"
into the microphone and Conversá "clicks" that link for you.  

For graphical links and image maps, Conversá overlays numbered icons on the
page corresponding to the number of nontext links. Simply say "number seven"
and the link marked #7 is activated. Very clever.  

In my testing I found Conversá to be around 90 percent accurate when
sound-input levels are optimized; I used a fairly high-end headset
microphone. Conversá includes a handy test program for getting the right
settings for your kind of microphone. And that's without any of the tedious
voice "training" other speech recognition applications require. When the
browser doesn't respond, it usually gets the drift if you repeat yourself
slowly.  

One thing Conversá doesn't do is take dictation--there's no speech-to-text
function here. That means you have to manually type in any URLs, passwords or
other text as you surf along. That keeps Conversá from being a true hands-off
browser (which would have been ideal for disabled users), but you'll be
surprised at how little you need to use your hands. It's a welcome break for
the sore-wristed, believe you me.  

Conversá also recognizes a few dozen browsing commands such as "Go Back" (1
to 3 pages), "Scroll Up/Down," "Page Up/Down," and so on. You can even open
and add to your Favorites list with voice commands, although further editing
and sorting must be done manually.  

Set-up is very easy, but make sure you have IE4 installed first. The online
help is a model of what good product tutorials should be. It can't be
easier--you just say "Conversá help me" and you're shuttled to the
well-organized tutorial Web site. Then you talk your way through it.  

One warning--Conversá will slow down your browsing. Pages generally took
longer to load using Conversá compared to Navigator 4.0. The slowdown isn't
much, but it's noticeable all the same. By saying "Go to sleep," you can turn
off speech recognition temporarily if you want to move faster or need to talk
to a neighbor. And bear in mind that, outside of the speech function, the
program essentially functions as IE4. Conversá says a Navigator-compatible
version is in the works.  

But this browser is easy to use, and frankly a lot of fun. Conversá Web is a
good idea if you do a lot of surfing and want to avoid the carpal tunnel
blues. Talking to your computer all day is also good for driving adjacent
colleagues to the brink of madness.  

Conversá Web is available for download at Conversá's Web site ($29.95); it's
also available on CD-ROM for $39.95. It requires Windows 95 and a Pentium 100
processor or higher.  

http://conversa.com