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Voice recognition
- Thread starter Aardvark
- Start date
Doug Johnson
kickbox
I'm dictating this with Dragon right now. I love it.
It's good if you produce a lot of documents, but you need to enunciate very clearly. Even then, it will make mistakes, but the mistakes don't bother me. It is much faster than I can type. Since I want to write clearly, I always go back and edit what I'm writing, so I catch most mistakes. Plus, I make a lot of mistakes when I type, so I'm not losing accuracy.
You need to have realistic expectations. If you expect Star Trek like perfection you will be disappointed. If you compare it to an imperfect keyboard, you'll probably be happy. The most important recommendation, however, is to get a very powerful computer with a ton of memory and a massive hard drive. It is a resource hog. If you try to run it on a slow machine you will be bitterly disappointed.
Also, you lose all privacy. If you are writing a violent thriller, or spicy romance, you might prefer being able to silently key in your words.
It's good if you produce a lot of documents, but you need to enunciate very clearly. Even then, it will make mistakes, but the mistakes don't bother me. It is much faster than I can type. Since I want to write clearly, I always go back and edit what I'm writing, so I catch most mistakes. Plus, I make a lot of mistakes when I type, so I'm not losing accuracy.
You need to have realistic expectations. If you expect Star Trek like perfection you will be disappointed. If you compare it to an imperfect keyboard, you'll probably be happy. The most important recommendation, however, is to get a very powerful computer with a ton of memory and a massive hard drive. It is a resource hog. If you try to run it on a slow machine you will be bitterly disappointed.
Also, you lose all privacy. If you are writing a violent thriller, or spicy romance, you might prefer being able to silently key in your words.
Peder
Well-Known Member
Aardvark,
I had experience of two sorts a few years ago, and I'll offer one important suggestion.
First, I knew a woman engineer at the office who used either that or Dragon Naturally Speaking all the time for composition of reports. Her reason was to avoid worsening her carpal tunnel condition so she really had no choice. She felt it worked fine for her purposes once she got it trained and got used to the special spoken commands for inserting punctuation marks, paragraphs breaks, stc. And, very important, after learning to speak consistently in the measured, even voice with which she had trained it. She remarked that if she had a slight cold, for example, the recognition went way down. On the other hand, she also had a slight lisp and she was impressed that the machine was able to deal with that. And she also remarked that using the software moved the physical stress from her wrist to her vocal cords. The somewhat unnatural way of speaking stressed her throat and she had to take breaks after every hour to two hours or so of continual speaking.
Second, I picked up either Viva Voce or Naturally Speaking for my home computer to try it out and learn something about voice recognition, geek that I am. My computer was on the slow and small side for the software, but I got it to work and trained it to a certain degree. It would work fairly well with noticeable time delays because of the slowness of my computer. So if you do get the software make sure you have lots of speed and available memory, the more the better. The box will tell you how much, but I suspect even more is better. Of course mine was not a fair test, but I learned what is probably obvious, that correction of typos brings overall speed way down, so training and proper speaking to produce excellent recognition performance are what is required for an overall pleasant experience using the software.
However, both of those sets of experience should be tempered by the realization that recognition technology may have come a long way in the past couple years.
So my strong advice is to seek out someone who actually uses a current version of the software and, if possible, see a demonstration of it, or talk to them about it. It may work much better these days than my descriptions imply. Overall, at the time of my experience it could not be said that it was the same as speaking to the computer in ordinary conversational tones and speech patterns. HAL was not here yet!
If anyone here has any more recent experience that would be extremely valuable to hear.
Hope this helps,
Peder
I had experience of two sorts a few years ago, and I'll offer one important suggestion.
First, I knew a woman engineer at the office who used either that or Dragon Naturally Speaking all the time for composition of reports. Her reason was to avoid worsening her carpal tunnel condition so she really had no choice. She felt it worked fine for her purposes once she got it trained and got used to the special spoken commands for inserting punctuation marks, paragraphs breaks, stc. And, very important, after learning to speak consistently in the measured, even voice with which she had trained it. She remarked that if she had a slight cold, for example, the recognition went way down. On the other hand, she also had a slight lisp and she was impressed that the machine was able to deal with that. And she also remarked that using the software moved the physical stress from her wrist to her vocal cords. The somewhat unnatural way of speaking stressed her throat and she had to take breaks after every hour to two hours or so of continual speaking.
Second, I picked up either Viva Voce or Naturally Speaking for my home computer to try it out and learn something about voice recognition, geek that I am. My computer was on the slow and small side for the software, but I got it to work and trained it to a certain degree. It would work fairly well with noticeable time delays because of the slowness of my computer. So if you do get the software make sure you have lots of speed and available memory, the more the better. The box will tell you how much, but I suspect even more is better. Of course mine was not a fair test, but I learned what is probably obvious, that correction of typos brings overall speed way down, so training and proper speaking to produce excellent recognition performance are what is required for an overall pleasant experience using the software.
However, both of those sets of experience should be tempered by the realization that recognition technology may have come a long way in the past couple years.
So my strong advice is to seek out someone who actually uses a current version of the software and, if possible, see a demonstration of it, or talk to them about it. It may work much better these days than my descriptions imply. Overall, at the time of my experience it could not be said that it was the same as speaking to the computer in ordinary conversational tones and speech patterns. HAL was not here yet!
If anyone here has any more recent experience that would be extremely valuable to hear.
Hope this helps,
Peder
Aardvark
New Member
Thank you Doug and Peder for your responses
I don’t think the PC speed will be too much of a problem; I’ve a new Pentium 4 thing with plenty of free memory (so far).
I'm only looking to dictate into Word so that I can edit and format at leisure and from your responses this sounds quite feasible
Unfortunately I don’t know anyone with this sort of software installed on their PC otherwise I’d be pestering them for a go. I think my next step is to see if the local computer shop can demonstrate a version and also find out what the exact system requirements are
If i go ahead and buy i'll update this post and let you know my progress (or lack of it)
I don’t think the PC speed will be too much of a problem; I’ve a new Pentium 4 thing with plenty of free memory (so far).
I'm only looking to dictate into Word so that I can edit and format at leisure and from your responses this sounds quite feasible
Unfortunately I don’t know anyone with this sort of software installed on their PC otherwise I’d be pestering them for a go. I think my next step is to see if the local computer shop can demonstrate a version and also find out what the exact system requirements are
If i go ahead and buy i'll update this post and let you know my progress (or lack of it)
Doug Johnson
kickbox
Make sure you buy an expensive microphone. You won't be happy with a cheap one.
Doug Johnson
kickbox
Aardvark said:If i go ahead and buy i'll update this post and let you know my progress (or lack of it)
Nothing to report?
Aardvark
New Member
Nothing to report?
Not yet, some unexpected bills have rather put paid to this venture for a little while (Cars and central heating boilers, who needs em? huh!)
As soon as I have recouped some spare cash i'm of to the shops to get me a copy, unless in-between times Santa does the right thing for a change
Not yet, some unexpected bills have rather put paid to this venture for a little while
(Cars and central heating boilers, who needs em? huh!)As soon as I have recouped some spare cash i'm of to the shops to get me a copy, unless in-between times Santa does the right thing for a change
Aardvark
New Member
If i go ahead and buy i'll update this post and let you know my progress (or lack of it)
I now have IBM'S viavoice version10.5 but i'm not using it to type this because right now i dont really know how to.
Due to a few teathing problems I have only just started the voice analysis process and have entered a few of words from my existing documents.
As seems to be fairly typical of most software i try and load on my pc it didn't work, in fact it has taken about 5 install/unistalls to get it to work.
In the end i did a defrag and disc cleanup and rolled back my Realtek HD Audio driver to the default windows driver. Then installed via my secondry CD drive having first disabled my antivirus and stopped all the background programs. I'm still getting an error message but at least the program now runs - the problem appears to be my audio driver but i'm not sure how to resolve it
From what i've seen so far the viavoice works pretty much as anticipated, speaking out loud feels a bit strange and saying the puntuation will take a bit of getting used to. I had a major PC failure mid last year and lost several word files but luckily have hard copies so the next task is a few quiet nights in dictating
As soon a i manage to get something together that i think might stand scrutiny i'll post it
Doug Johnson
kickbox
I'm dictating this. If you can get it working, it's great.