Need help with Speech to Text Software

Here is David Pogue's (NY Times Tech writer) latest on the one he uses now:

Dragon Naturally Speaking v10

I have read many good reviews on it.

I use this one but it doesn't like my French Canadian accent. You can only set it for Australian, British, or US if my memory serves me well. The result is that most words are ok but some are very strange.

The problem is that the errors are difficult to find because they sound good. One must read the text very carefully to find them. I find that it doesn't interact very well with MS spell checker and has difficulty with capitals at the beginning of a sentence.

I have tried the correction and adaptive training but it didn't improve much for me.

While I have an accent, it is not that bad. So, be careful when jumping into this.

I am not using it anymore. I will give it to somebody else who's mother was English.

Thanks my accent is somewhere between nothing and nowhere

If you're running a Vista machine the built-in speach program works surprisingly well.

Addendum, and occasionally you'll notice a mistake in my typing or I should say the computers typing , such as the one in the previous post ( learned you go adaptive program) which obviously should have been learn as you go adaptive program.

So you do have to proofread however I would say 100 words a minute with 90% to 95% accuracy is attainable once the program is thoroughly trained for your voice.

Is this voice recognition software included in Vista home edition also or only in Vista professional?

Hello yesyen:

I know voice-recognition is included in home premium and I believe it is also included in home basic but I'm not sure.

http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?mode=r&query=speech+recognition+vista&spid=global&catalog=LCID%3D1033&1033comm=1&res=20

Go to start and type 'windows speech recognition' then enter

Thanks to you all.

The one built into Word works well too and gets better the more you use it. It has almosr learnrd to ignore my Hillbilly accent.

M Y 1 9 9 9 V E R S I O N W O R K S W E L L

m i one nine nine vission rrr vorks well and fist and dos nt piss a veter ...

The new ones are actually good. I will buy one in 2011.

It's difficult to wreck a nice beach.

We used to have a saying "Beaches for Africa"... well even those are disappearing in some places (now that you mention it) - go to Africa for instructions on how to wreck a nice beach!

Your question kinda jumps the gun; by which I mean you would do best to start with what you already have to see how voice recognition and your fingers get along...before jumping to expensive, high end applications. (Kinda like starting on a street bike before graduating to big highway motorcycles.)

As stated before, Windows XP and later (maybe 200o, too?) all provide the voice recognition you see. By XP, it works fairly well, too, even with low cost headset (mike, which wasn't always the case...hence Dragon once always offered their application with a very expensive mike...but no longer). You might find that the MS built in application is sufficient. What ever you do, if you use the computer much at all, I suspect you will most likely go back to relying on your fingers. The kind of VR assistance you would probably be pleased with is the kind mostly used by large corporations (for phone answering and directory service and such)--and, accordingly, prohibitively expensive.

Your question kinda jumps the gun

There is no predilection in the question.

Kinda like starting on a street bike before graduating to big highway motorcycles

Street bike handling characteristics are intrinsically different from a big highway machines.

I didn't ask the question for myself only; for some even a $800-$900 program would so intensely benefit their computing experiences to be non-prohibitive for them. For me a $200 program would be dandy

Hello again bwire:

I Am Using the Standard Version of Dragon, I think I paid 50 bucks for it at Frys on sale it doesn't have the bells and whistles like the ability to plug in your Digital voice recorder and have the program type what you been musing as you go down the road. (In my case I wonder how much this tickets going to cost)

Preferred list for $200, and have seen it on the web this morning for a hundred or so, has those additional features.

And of course when you start looking at the medical and legal versions and so forth they are appropriately priced . Seems that somebody at Nuance has determined what a lawyer and a proctologist have in common and decided to return the favor, 900 bucks and up.

Just got pointed at this question site.

I have XP Pro on my PC but to my knowledge, there is no voice recognition system built in.

If it's there, how do I go aboiut finding it?

My arthritis can hardly wait!

Ken Leigh

Hello Kenneth:

Part of it is already there, but you need to get some free files to make it work. It was years ago when I tried it, I don't think it worked all that well, but heck it's free.

You never know it may have been updated since I last played with it, the one in Vista home premium seems to work relatively well, and since I am using the 64-bit version of Vista, I can't currently use Dragon on that machine. Good luck, let me know how works.

Hi,

I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking (Standard and Preferred edition) for a couple of years now and I am quite happy with it. One of the features I like most is a function which analyses existing document son your computer to analyse your typical style of writing. Thus, the system improves the recoginiton capability and stores new words in the user specific vocabulary. I found this specifically helpful when I started to write technical / engineering texts because many of the phrase and words which are typically used are not in the standard vocabulary and this feature helped a lot to extend the vocabulary.

Although I found, that the microphone quality was not that important which respect to word recognition, more expensive units (digital) may have advantages when you use them in a location with high background noise, because they typically habe a background noise supression feature.

Regards nudnik