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Ask Slashdot: Is There a Useful Voice-Activated PC? (dailycaring.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the commanding-voices dept.

An anonymous reader writes: My elderly monther-in-law misses her computer. Her mind is okay, but she cannot use a computer because of her Parkinson's disease.

I am not all that impressed with Amazon Echo. Seems you can ask the Echo for the time of day, or the weather outside, but it will not do anything useful -- like send an email. A voice controlled PC would be great, even if it only did a few simple tasks.
The original submission ends with a question: "Is there such a thing?" So leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Is there a useful voice-activated PC?

5 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Any PC or Mac with a microphone. by damnbunni · · Score: 4, Informative

    Windows since XP and MacOS since like... 9.0 have included voice assistive technologies.

    You just have to turn them on.

    If the OS's built in speech recognition and control don't do what you want, buy a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

  2. iPad, Siri and accessibility features by k2r · · Score: 4, Informative

    An iPad with proper accessibility settings and Siri voice recognition.
    Iâ(TM)m not a native speaker and Siri does understand me well enough to write proper emails and messages.

    https://www.abilitynet.org.uk/...

  3. Tremor Cancellation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not a direct answer, but perhaps helpful -- there is some promising work being done with tremor compensation/cancellation technology. Strap on a bracelet with a type of vibrator attached and it can stabilize your hand movements, kind of like camera stabilization does for taking pictures.

    https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/projects-backed-by-google-and-microsoft-are-tackling-parkinsons-disease/

  4. Dragon NaturallySpeaking by taxman_10m · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think that does what you are looking for.

  5. Dragon/dragonfly by arnott · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can train your PC to do that. I use dragon naturally speaking with dragonfly python scripting. There are many python libraries which are built on dragonfly, which do the job.

    Caster is a good one. Check these tutorials.

    You will need to spend some time to understand how things work and train your mother-in-law to use the customized voice commands.

    Search for "dragon naturally speaking demo" on YouTube to see what others do.