voice recogition software...any users?

I think voice recognition software is a great idea but in practice we found it lacking. Haven’t tried it in two years now but my son attends a ‘state of the art’ school in computer science and no one there is using voice recognition. Makes me think it still has ‘bugs’ in it.

But some parents have posted to this board speaking positively of it. We tried one of the Dragon Naturally Speaking products ourselves and could not get it to read my son’s voice with accuracy.

If you do a google search, you’ll likely find some sites that review the latest voice recognition software whatever it might be.

Good luck.

I agree. I have used it myself— Via Voice for Mac and iListen for Mac (was even a beta tester for the later). Everytime I had an allergy (read half the time or more), my performance on the thing went down. I doubt it is somehting you could hear but the voice recognition did. I have heard of some people who are successful with it at about the 98% (meaning missing two out of 100 words— I do max about 85%.). They have nice even voices, no allergies, etc. You prolly need about a 4-5th grade reading level for this at least.

One product that has been useful to me in the past was Cowriter which is word prediction. There are several others out there. It is “guesses” at your next word based on grammar and your first few letters you type. It is very slow, but the accuracy is very high. So if you have a frustrating time typing or trouble reading it will help you out. I still think to use it in an adult sort of way that you need a 4th grade spelling level. There is a new Cowriter, and also some that claim to be better.

—des

Oh yeah, I should comment that voice recognition is difficult for teens because the voice is changing, particularly boys. And that the models for the voice recognition engine are adult. I think Dragon or IBM experimented with a teen version but I think it was about the most returned piece of software I have ever seen. (Used to go to a store that carried returned software.) Also takes a high frustration tolerance. You are more inaccurate as you start using and then your accuracy should go up but you have to got thru that, and a lot of kids can’t take it. Make that a lot of people. However, there are some people who need it badly enoguh that they can put up with all this. The PC products are more developed than the Mac ones, having been around longer, but they still are not real good with teen voices.

—des

Agreed.

I’ve had some experience with Dragon and ViaVoice over the years, but I have 3 coworkers who do computer accommodations evaluations for a living - the team consists of a computer engineer and 2 OTs. The software is getting better and better and more people every year appear to find it useful. OTOH, slow typing, if possible, is still preferred by most over the hassle of dictating to the computer.

I hesitate to recommend a product because things could change again in the month or three before you actually make the purchase.

John

Why I recommend you try word prediction. It solves a couple problems that very poor typists and people with dyslexia might have. Fatigue from typing and the inability to spell words. Cowriter 4000 has a feature that takes phonetic spellings or common misspellings and converts these to the correct word. A parent or teacher could also create macros that would do this. This program was great for me. I was a terrible typists with a typing speed of about 5 words a minute. I also was very frustrated as I made so many errors. A good word prediction software can type into any software just about (I think database is the exception.). And this literally was the case— online, different word processors, etc. So there is a nice flexibiltity there. I have since gotten to be a better typist (long story, but it was NOT from typing software— mighta taught me to type but I got SO frustrated with them).

Anyway, as I said they are SLOW, but the lower fatigue and very high accuracy makes up for this. Something you should check out, imo.

—des

I’d definitely “try before you buy.” See if you can find a workshop to do the training for Dragon Dictate (they do them at my community college periodically) — then you get guided through the process and it’s done right.

and one more thing…
an awful lot of people find that, well, to put it bluntly, we don’t really talk the way we should write. Lots of students benefit more than they realized from the whole kinesthetic aspect of writing or typing (I know I do, though I’m not anything like dyslexic and can already type fast). Word prediction and hearing what they write help a lot (TextHelp! does both nicely)

Hi,

My first post. Mom to 17 year old college bound next year. He’s a brain cancer survivor - LD issues - got 790 on verbal SAT but sits in front of a blank computer screen for hours though he is quite eloquent when talking. Thought this voice recognition software might help.

Loaded it up yesterday. Warning - you need at least 512 Ram and a fast processor to run this software, it’s very demanding of resources. Plugged in the headset and trained the program to my voice by reading some passages to it.

Within half an hour it was wonderfully accurate and it is heaps of fun. Not hard to learn how to correct the mistakes it makes. I enunciate more clearly than my son so I’ll let you know after he tries it whether he likes it. He is a technology maven so hopefully will find it cool…

My 17 year old is having success with Dragon too. We did have a Dragon trainer come to the house to teach him, but in 2 one hour sessions he felt more comfortable than I had been able to do on my own. It still takes a while to correct errors, but I think he will just get better and better at using the program and it helps him to be so much more independent.

Hi,

My son loves this software and I think it’s quite miraculous, because when I use it it is extremely accurate, but it’s too soon to say how well it will work for him, because his speech is very mumbly. I have sent away for a USB microphone (the one recommended as most successful in the “hardware compatability) section on Dragon’s site) to see if it will work better.

My 15 year old is having great success with the newest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking. He trained it, did the 30 minute tutorial, practiced a bit on AOL IM and then wrote a really good history paper. It was the first time ever that one of his papers sounded like it was even close to the grade level of his thinking. We did find that we had to turn off the voice recognition software that comes with Windows XP. It was conflicting, and the accuracy was horrendous until we turned off the Windows program.

Hi,

For the benefit of all, could you please post the procedure for turning off the voice recognition software within Windows XP? THANKS!