Voice Recognition Software
 

So.... does anyone have any recommendations on voice recognition software? My high school age nephew is in an amazing cast and needs to find some way to write papers without typing. He's a Windows guy, so hopefully something will work on that OS.

Thanks!

If I recall correctly Dragonspeak is pretty good.

Thanks!

It's Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Newest version does not require "training" if you speak directly to the computer. For some reason, it still requires training if you wish it to transcribe voice files from a digital voice recorder.

I'll vouch for Dragon...its coping with my PhD thesis remarkably well so far considering its in medical ethics and I am throwing things like Nichomedan and Hippocrates at it.

Dragon. We recomend it for our people who need it, and when one of the staff busted her arm she used it here.

It's not at all expensive, $100 or so for the basic version, another $50 for the preferred. It learns quickly and most people like it.

Not sure if it comes with the headset or not, you will need one of those too.

Ditto on Dragon, ^ it's been a lifesaver for one of our managers here at work. Without it, he'd have been up the proverbial creek.

DragonSpeak is good. However, Vista has voice recognition built in that works brilliantly with Microsoft Word -- as long as you speak clearly, it will recognize natural speech, i.e. just dictate, no need to go word-at-a-time.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend getting Vista just for this feature, but if you already have it, it works great.

Note, too, that which ever solution you use, a good microphone and quiet environment is critical.

The microphone needs to be a headset king with the "boom" that rests a constant distance in front of your mouth. Acoustic variations affect the accuracy a great deal. I was hoping to use the program to transcribe lectures. However, even with a good microphone just walking about the room and the variations in volume and pitch one uses in speaking to a group were enough to make it useless.

In an office, "dictation voice" and compared to theatrical voice? It is great.

Really? I can't get the darn thing to understand a word I'm saying. It just keeps saying "what did you mean". The few things it does recognize are 100% incorrect.

The microphone makes a huge difference. I was testing it with a very good recording mike, and it worked perfectly. It worked almost as well with a hard-wired boom mike of the type that Teacher49 is describing. I also tried it with my Bluetooth headset, but that didn't work at all.

Dragon is really the ONLY voice recognition program today, the IBM VIAVOICE is not even a contendor in the market and there isn't another product. Nuance is coming out with their own product soon though, not sure what that will bring.

I use DICTATE on the mac as well for parents, which is not based on the dragon VR engine. Really took it to 97-98% accuracy.

Thanks, all. I have passed on the suggestion, and donated a very good headset with a mic.

I just got Dragon Naturally Speaking based on this thread. I installed it on an XP virtual machine on an iMac. I have a good quality USB microphone and am very pleasantly surprised with the accuracy and editing ability. I had a couple earlier versions and this one seems much better.

My nephew reports that his Dragon is working fine. He's in downeast Maine and has one heck of an an accent, too!

Dragon Naturally Speaking Standard is on sale at just $39.99 for the next 2 and a half hours on Amazon:

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travel...eaking-9-3999/

Let me revive this thread to ask specifically about Dragon/Nuance for Mac. Does anyone have any particular experience with it?

Many thanks,

I used the PREVIOUS version of the best VR for MAC, which was called MACSPEECH which was pretty darn good.

At macworld this year, Macspeech introduced a NEW version of Macspeech called Macspeech Dictate. This product NOW uses the nuance/dragon VR engine, and apparently GREATLY improves accuracy. I haven't bought the upgrade yet (I should have, it was only 79$ at the time) but my FATHER bought it and said it really improved his use of the product. And, he thought it was pretty good to begin with.

I haven't been out there yet to try it, but I'll try in next month when I am on the east coast. Reviews show it to be quite good.

There is no longer a DRAGON/NUANCE product for MAC sold by Nuance.

I run the PC version in an XP virtual machine using VM Ware. I use either a microphone or a Sony digital recorder. It works pretty well. The newer Macs have enough performance to do VR in the virtual machine with decent speed, at least with XP. Im not sure I would want to run it in Vista that way.

On Windows Vista the speech recognition is built in and works great! I have been utilizing it over the last week and only a few minor issues, like not working to type text here in a forum or elsewhere if using Firefox, and not typing body of mails in Thunderbird, but most
other apps seem to work just fine.

I really like the fact that you can speak in full sentence structure and it accurately understands in most cases even for complex words like know, wind, effect/affect.

I am interested in your experience in using this software with your digital recorder. Are you dictating - that is fixed distance from microphone, speaking to the machine? I have not been able to get good results with digital recording of lectures to an open room. Using the "teacher's voice" with a variety of pitch and volume and pacing seems to be beyond Dragon 9.

This past week version 10 has been announced. I am not sure enough of it to invest even the $99.00 they are asking for upgrade ... unless I get some tricks!

Thanks for a response if you have the time!