Has anyone had any experience with “voice -to -text software”? I know nothing about it but read of the concept in some LD literature. My son is hampered in getting his thoughts on paper by the physical job of writing. We will pursue keyboarding skills but I was curious about this software. Thanks!
Re: voice -to -text software ?
We tried ViaVoice - didn’t work.
The computer could not understand our son, would have taken
hours and hours and hours to train it, then as our son matured
we weren’t sure the computer would keep up.
Think it is more of a device that could help an adult dyslexic.
Anne
Re: voice -to -text software ?
We have Dragon Naturally speaking. Our dyslexic son was 11 when we got it. We struggled with it for one school year and then abandoned it.
My son is easily frustrated and has no patience. You need to have both those characteristics and be highly motivated to get voice recognition to work. Sometimes it would interpret the words incorrectly because he doesn’t enunciate well (sort of lazy speech) and sometimes we would get incorrect words or it would be incredibly slow because of what I felt were problems with system resource issues. (Our Compaq Presario loads alls sorts of crazy stuff at startup — I could never figure out how to get enough system resources freed up before we started the application.)
And if you have dyslexia, it is pretty hard to read the passages correctly (in a little tiny font, by the way) to train it. And you have to a lot of training to get the application to work consistently.
Then there’s the self-consciousness factor. For some of us, it is just awkward to talk out loud.
I’d say it was just as much work, if not more, for our son. I thought he’d enjoy it. He thought it was torture.
Re: voice -to -text software ?
I’m planning to purchase voice-to-text software for my son this summer. I’ve used it with one of my students, and I view it as one more tool. I found it somewhat hard to use in the classroom, because of background noise. However, this student did have opportunities to work in my office and that worked better for him. Yes, clear articulation makes it much easier to use, but the student I worked with had some misarticulations and it was still beneficial for him. Yes, it took a long time to train and patience is an asset. At this point for my son, I’m planning for it to be used as an option for homework. He’s more fatigued in the evening, and although he has some basic keyboarding skills, he’s not proficient. My hope is that it will give him one more way to gain more independence in regard to writing.
Most (but not all) people wiht LDs who try it are motivated to work harder at keyboarding. If his language skills are good and it’s really a motor issue, he’s more likely to like the stuff. You have to train the software to your voice which takes a lot of *very* focused time. When it misunderstands you, you get to either just correct it or “teach” it that mistake — it’s so easy to just correct it, but hten the software always makes that same mistake.
Our community college had a workshop open to anybody to come in and learn to use it. That would be the best way to do it IMHO — even though then if you got it yourself you’d probably have to do it again (though maybe you can save those “voice files” and transfer them) — I know I would do a much better job a second time.