Office suite with voice recognition capability - Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 business application suite - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Sept 13, 1999

COREL Corp's latest office suite, WordPerfect Office 2000, comes with improved features and functionalities to give its more illustrious rival, Microsoft Office, a run for the money. The applications that are included in this business productivity suite are WordPerfect 9, Quattro Pro 9, Corel Presentations 9, CorelCentral 9 and Paradox 9.

WordPerfect 9 is the word processing application that facilitates the production of professional-looking documents such as newsletters, articles, reports and much more.

Quattro Pro 9 is the spreadsheet offering from the suite and lets users manage, analyse and report numerical data. It provides the tools to produce tables, financial forms, lists, charts and other objects.

End users who want to create slide shows and drawings can use Corel Presentations 9 which is a multimedia presentation and drawing application in the WordPerfect Office 2000 suite.

Another application that is useful is the CorelCentral 9, a personal information manager (PIM) to help you manage as well as organise your tasks and activities both at work and home. The PIM software allows you to schedule your daily tasks, write reminders as well as record contact information.

The relational database program, Paradox 9, completes the suite. It organises and retrieves data by means of forms, charts and reports. However, it is only available in the Professional and Enterprise editions of the suite.

For existing users of WordPerfect Office 2000, the new features include Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and NetPerfect programs.

The inclusion of Adobe Acrobat Reader is to facilitate the viewing and printing of portable document format (PDF) files. WordPerfect and Corel Presentations documents can also be saved in the PDF format. VBA, which is integrated in WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Corel Presentations and CorelCentral can be used by developers to build customised solutions.

NetPerfect publishes any documents created in WordPerfect Office 2000 suite on the Internet. This allows users to view documents they have created using any standard browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

The other new feature in this suite which I find particularly innovative is its voice recognition capability.

The voice recognition application lets you speak in your natural voice and the words spoken will be transcribed immediately onto the screen and included in the WordPerfect document.

In order to utilise the voice recognition functionality, you must install the Philips FreeSpeech 2000 software after setting up WordPerfect Office 2000.

Once you have successfully installed it, just plug in the headset provided with the package and you are ready to input your data by voice input.

There are four options within FreeSpeech 2000 for you to operate its functions. The Dictation mode obviously allows you to input text into your document by just speaking the words. You are not only limited to dictate in English but other major languages like Spanish and Italian which are included in the FreeSpeech language packages on the CD-ROM.

Each user of FreeSpeech 2000 will have his own personal settings and Context which contains the active vocabulary and language model of the user. You can expand the Context by adding words that you frequently use in the active vocabulary.

The Command mode enables you to control your operating system, programs, and dialogue boxes by issuing the appropriate commands by voice. You can even perform formatting and editing in the suite under this particular mode.

Users can also spell out words and numbers which they want to enter into documents during the Spelling mode. Of course, there are spelling rules specific to FreeSpeech 2000 which must be followed by the users.

In order to enable the production of impressive-looking documents, WordPerfect Office 2000 offers more than 1,000 TrueType and Type 1 fonts. There are also more than 12,000 clip-art images and symbols as well as 200 photos to add spice to your documents.

A 30-day trial version of Corel PrintOffice is bundled with this suite. This graphical application enables you to easily create dazzling-looking documents such as brochures, business cards, labels and many more with its built-in templates.

The minimum system requirements for WordPerfect Office 2000 with Philips FreeSpeech 2000 are 166 megahertz (MHz) Pentium processor with 64 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and 270MB of free hard disk space. If you choose not to use the voice recognition, you will only need a minimum system configuration of a 486 personal computer with 16MB RAM and 170MB hard disk space.

With its impressive functionalities and ease of use, WordPerfect Office 2000 suite appears to be a viable alternative in the business-productivity applications arena.