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Dictation Software for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-those-who-find-typing-overrated dept.

Yottabyte84 asks: "As a student, I often have the need to type up papers, however like most people I talk faster then I type. I've lately been looking to get a dictation program, but I don't wanna boot Windows every time I need to use it. IBM has a commercial version of ViaVoice for Linux and a free SDK. I'm unclear what the SDK can do, and would be willing to buy the commercial product if the SDK doesn't fit my needs. What I'd really like to be able to do is give spoken text input into the Linux apps I already use, but could live with being stuck with a simple included word processer. Have any of you tried ViaVoice or the SDK? How well did they work for you?"

1 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. problems? by Roadmaster · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I had several issues while trying viavoice and dragon naturally speaking.

    You definitely should give it a try before committing.

    When you're typing, the kind of mistakes you make are of the kind known as "typos", where you mistype one letter for another. Those are hard to spot but in the end they don't matter that much.

    With voice recognition, you have BIG mistakes; like, the engine mistaking one word for another totally different, or complete sentences. That is big, and actually requires you to go through the entire document and fix the errors.

    Also, most voice recognizers i've seen aren't too adept at handling changes of mind; when you're speaking, you tend to make mistakes, because you changed your mind, or you meant something else, or whatnot. Recognizers aren't too forgiving of these situations. You'll end up with more crap on your document that you'll have to fix. In order to provide a coherent flow of speech for the recognizer, you basically have to be reading it from somewhere else. Which pretty much beats the purpose of the recognizer. If it's already printed, why not OCR it instead? it's bound to be much more accurate and faster. Also, if you have to write your stuff by hand before dictating it into the computer, you defeat the purpose of the voice recognition software. Because I guess you can type faster than you can handwrite :)