Are You Talking to Your PC Yet?

An anonymous reader writes "If you have ever asked "Do those speech-to-text apps like Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM ViaVoice really work?" Pocket PC Addict has posted a detailed review of Dragon Naturally Speaking for Pocket PC and Desktop machines. It is written from the perspective of someone who has been burned by speech to text software in the past and had vowed to never try one of these apps again. It is encouraging for slow typists who would like to use their voice to write. Plus it details some valuable tips for using it with Pocket PCs."

Comments

OpenSource Voice recognition projects?

[farsideofthemoon]

Any recommended ones? http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/

Re:Can't RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirror

Re:I tried with my Mac

[wibs]

I don't have enough experience with iListen or ViaVoice for my opinion on them to matter, but I found the built-in speech recognition for 10.2 and 10.3 to be more annoying than anything else. It would work just often enough for me to think it was doing its job, but fail just often enough to be a consistent pain in the ass. I'm looking forward to the complete rewrite in 10.4, aka VoiceOver. Here's the apple hype page for it: http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/voiceover.html.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is excellent

[techmuse]

I have used Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional for many years, and ViaVoice before that. ViaVoice's recognition was not so great, and the program crashed constantly. Dragon works very well. I can do around 140-150 wpm with it. I seem to have to make 1-2 corrections per sentence, sometimes less. I am using Dragon 7, but there is a new version (8) out now. I highly recommend this program if you have repetitive stress injuries, or would like to avoid developing them.

Re:I treid with my Mac

[pdiaz]

I don't know OS X Voice commands system, but I'm guessing that it works on a reduced vocabulary (i.e.: "close", "open", "mail", and such). That's the key there: with reduced vocabularies and a strict syntax speech recognition works pretty good. The challenge is to make it work with a natural lang . such as English (and in real time)

Said in another way: when you issue a voice command to OS X, it has to choose between 40-100 alternatives (this is guesswork). (True) speech recognizers work with +60K vocabularies...

Using DNS/Natlink/Vocola

[wstephens]

I've been using voice for about 6 months. I had a big issue with right hand pain this year so I talked to a fellow developer who helped me get setup. We've done some custom grammars in python for or dev environment. It's been helpful. It's a long way to go if you want to reduce mouse usage. The mouse has to be the worst peripheral for the PC. I'm considering buying the SmartNav http://www.naturalpoint.com/smartnav/ to get rid of my mouse. I've messed with one on a PC with 2 screens. It was nice.

Nat Friedman's experience

[Dammital]

Nat (the Ximian dude) recently hurt himself and has been reduced to being a one-handed typist. In order to stay connected, he's hired someone to take dictation for him. In today's blog entry he talks about the experience, what it's like for a very competent typist to use a dictation system, and thinks aloud about future intelligent speech-to-text applications.

Dragon works great - with the right microphone

[Silicon Knight]

I'm supporting users in a medical environment with Dragon 7. Getting the right microphones made all the difference. We went from an average 96% to 98-99% efficiency just by spending ~$200 on Sennheiser headset microphones and Andrea USB sound pods from these folks.

Not affiliated, just a happy user - thanks for getting the MDs off my back!