From ns.itep.ru!Radio-MSU.net!Gamma.RU!srcc!satisfy.kiae.su!news1.relcom.ru!demos!news.uni-stuttgart.de!uniol!uni-erlangen.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!newscaster-1.mcast.net!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!cyberspace.com!news.sprintlink.net!news-stk-3.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-fw-12.sprintlink.net!news.cuny.edu!afecu Fri Jun 21 08:56:16 1996 Path: ns.itep.ru!Radio-MSU.net!Gamma.RU!srcc!satisfy.kiae.su!news1.relcom.ru!demos!news.uni-stuttgart.de!uniol!uni-erlangen.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!newscaster-1.mcast.net!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!cyberspace.com!news.sprintlink.net!news-stk-3.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-fw-12.sprintlink.net!news.cuny.edu!afecu From: Aron Eisenpress Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.beta Subject: Merlin info Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 22:37:39 EDT Lines: 67 Message-ID: <96171.223739AFECU@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: cunyvm.cuny.edu Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for this post Here's a bunch of pretty authoritative info from a presentation that Paul Giangarra, Merlin lead architect and a dynamite presenter, did this evening for local Team OS/2 folk in connection with PC Expo here in New York. (Paul is also doing a public presentation tomorrow at PC Expo - if you read this in time, go!) VoiceType: - The *only* difference between the VT support in Merlin and the Win 95 VT that was just announced is $700. - Merlin comes with a 22,000 word vocabulary, and the 4 (I think) additional vocabularies can be added to that, just as with the current product. - The version in the beta is not tuned and has some known memory leaks. (Obviously, that'll be fixed before release.) - It does not need training, but it does have two training options (one, I think, is the Mark Twain story that's always been used; the other is shorter, I think he said 50 sentences rather than 270). It also learns as it's used. It worked fine for him even though he'd only used it once before this demo. (The demo IBM's been giving at PC Expo doesn't work nearly as well, but that's a terribly noisy situation, which makes a big difference.) - Paul used a ThinkPad with a P75 processor and it worked fine (in spite of the recommended P90 minimum). He said that a Cyrix 6x86 has been tested and works fine (the 5x86 is a 486-class processor and isn't sufficient); he didn't mention the AMD processors specifically but implied that any Pentium- class processor would also work ok. - There is no MWAVE or VTD card support (as we know). Paul says he's trying to get this fixed. (I think that's a couple of notches below "will be fixed".) The reason was the time for development and the larger number of folks who would be able to use it, but Paul mentioned that the IBM PC Co. does have a pretty large number of ThinkPads out there with MWAVE in them (including the one he was using)... - Navigation is continuous speech; dictation is still discrete speech. - A microphone will come with every retail box of Merlin. A good quality microphone makes a difference, and even matching it electrically to the soundcard helps. (Someone else mentioned that a Radio Shack $19.99 mike gives very good results, so it's not an awfully expensive addition to the package.) Other items: - The price will be similar to Warp Connect. - There's a known bug in the system performance monitor that seems to cause a lockup; it'll be fixed before release. - The new IAK dialer (whose name I forget) shows current bytes/second and total bytes transferred each way, and it looks pretty spiffy. - The HPFS cache changes (more than 2mb and changeable via command) are not in the beta but are in plan for the release. Removable HPFS support is not. I hope this is of interest! He didn't say much more on these - obviously there are a lot more questions one could ask... ------- -- Aron Eisenpress, City U of NY / Computing and Information Services (AFECU@CUNYVM.BITNET, or AFECU@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU on the Internet)