Voice Recognition Program

[BigFred]

Hi Folks

I realise that this should be on the Software Board, but more people come here and I do wish to use it on a Win98 machine.

Does anyone have any experiences with Voice Recognition Software? Experiences - Good/Bad - what brand do you recomend? Thanks in anticipation. BF

[Report_2]

I tried IBM ViaVoice and it stinks. You have to talk like a machine and it is good at about 60% correct.

It is faster to type it then to edit the errors.

[IMM]

Microsoft used to have some development software out there for this - but I don't know what's available at the moment.

Perhaps historically "Dragon Naturally Speaking" has been the most sucessful.
Whether you have any luck with such a program partly depends on your voice - but STRONGLY depends on your headset microphone type and its placement relative to your mouth.

[markp62]

This sounds more on the line of Microsoft Agent technology. I have poked around on this. Though, I did not find anything that will truly and accurately take what you speak and put it into a word processing program. You have to take the time to train your computer (or vice versa) to your voice. I had played around with a VBS script I created to run programs and navigate through and around windows by using voice commands.
But here are some links to poke around in.
http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/
http://msagentworld.tripod.com/
http://www.agentry.net/
http://www.msagentring.org/chars/

[BigFred]

Thanks for the replies so far folks. I've heard of Dragon Naturally Speaking, but not used or even seen it, I had heard that the old IBM stuff wasn't very good. Dragon are advertising version 6 now, anyone used it? All advice apreciated. BF

[paisan]

I just installed Dragon 6 for a teenager who is in a wheelchair and uses it to write papers in Word.

She trained it in about 20 minutes and it seems to have a voice command for almost everything you can do with the mouse or keyboard.

It worked very well and certain words like a persons name had to entered manually and then you train the software to recognize the name. After that she would speak the name and it came up perfect. Just as neat was when she was dictating, she used big words, for example perserverance and it came up spelled correctly on the first shot.

BTW she was running this software on a Compaq 1270 laptop which I believe is about 3 or 4 years old. Ran just fine but this program does need RAM. She had 160mb in the laptop and I believe Dragon recommends at least 128mb.

Hope this info helps.

[BigFred]

Thanks Paisan

This is just the sort of information I was looking for. Thanks a lot. BF

[readrj]

I bought VoiceType Simply Speaking some years back.

It took about an hour to train it and produced 100% correct results. Words not inthe vocabulary and peoples names had to entered manually initially, but were remembered next time they appeared.

The down side is that you have to say each word separately and can't use "continuous speech". Maybe the technology has improved now to overcome this.

I understand there are continuous speech programs available now. Perhaps someone else could comment on them.