Digital Recorder Does Voice-to-Text 
The $199 Olympus DS-150 holds up to 160 minutes of speech and comes with IBM
ViaVoice. 

by Stan Miastkowski, special to PC World 
April 27, 1999, 4:01 a.m. PT 

Do you want a voice recorder that knows what to do with your dictation?
Olympus America this week introduced its second-generation digital voice
recorder. 

The $199 DS-150, which will be available in June, records up to 160 minutes
in its 8MB of memory. It weighs 2.5 ounces, measures 4.5 by 1.7 by 0.6
inches, and records up to 10 hours using a pair of AAA alkaline batteries. 

For speech-to-text conversion, the DS-150 comes with IBM ViaVoice 98
voice-recognition software. You download the digital speech files to your PC
using a serial cable (included). An Olympus spokesperson says an optional
Universal Serial Bus interface will be available in August; pricing for that
isn't available yet. 

The DS-150 has two recording modes. SP, which must be used for voice-to-text
conversion, records up to 75 minutes; the LP mode records up to 160 minutes.
The recorder uses Digital Speech Standard files, which are optimized for
speech recognition and one-thirteenth or less the size of .wav files, Olympus
says. 

The recorder stores messages in two folders, each of which can hold up to 99
messages. Messages can be moved between folders, and the DS-150 includes
editing capabilities such as insert, delete, and partial erase. 

The device automatically starts recording when it "hears" sounds, and stops
as soon as it senses silence. The DS-150 has an LCD display that shows the
remaining recording time, the date and time, voice activation mode, play
mode, and battery status. 

The DS-150 is the second available digital recorder to offer speech-to-text
conversion. It competes directly with the Dragon Systems' $249
NaturallySpeaking Mobile, which features a digital recorder with 4MB of
memory that holds up to 40 minutes of text. Dragon's entry comes with
NaturallySpeaking Preferred voice recognition software.