Voice Recognition Software

The only one I’m familiar with is Dragon Naturally Speaking. From what I understand it takes a lot of time to fine tune it and “train” it to the voice. I’ve heard it’s much better for older children. I haven’t tried it yet although I will consider it when my 4th grader gets older.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is the most commonly used one, more than Via Voice). I’ve done the training — well, it’s reasonably easy to use… but in some ways it’s harder than writing because of the language demands of thinking *as* you talk. I would definitely not invest in it without going to a workshop and trying it out with some good guidance (our community college has them on a regular basis).

My daugther is 22 and trying to use Naturally Speaking Dragon. It does take time and does (as Leah suggests) require thinking as you are dictaking. “You might be question why “thinking” is involved in training.

Well, for those who have reading difficulties, word retrival is difficult. So it helps for those training on it to read something they have written, or just speak naturally, describing the room, or telling a joke, or story. Something that doesn’t require alot of work knowing the words or the way the organization is with what they want to say. The computer then types what they are saying, and if it isn’t correct, then you have a list of commands that you need to use, such as “erase”, etc.

This is type of technology is getting better every year.

We just purchased L&H VoiceXpress for my 4th grade son. My son has nonverbal learning disability and has difficulty writing. This system plays right to his verbal strengths. He’s been using it for five days and he’s been very successful, so far. We purchased a USB converter for his headset and that seems to really be improving the quality of the microphone, which aids the recognition. I also trained on it and it definitely recognized the adult voice faster than than the child’s.

I’ve used L&H VoiceXpress with a student a year ago, and it was much more difficult. What I’d look for to use the system: a good microphone, as fast a computer processor as you can get, a quiet environment (difficult to use in the classroom) and good articulation skills. I would also consider cognitive ability and reading skills. Not that these issues would stop me from buying the system, but I might think harder about cost (both time and money)/benefit. The training for the system requires reading passages with difficult vocabulary, and it’s going to take longer to train if their is an issue with decoding.

I chose L&H VoiceXpress over Dragon and ViaVoice because it was cheaper than Dragon and had a larger vocabulary. ViaVoice I didn’t know as much about. The down side to L&H is that the company has been sold and I don’t know if it will be supported as well. Dragon has the name and following and I would expect continued support.

Well, that was probably more than you wanted. Sorry for the length.

Cathy, you can hardly ever give me more info than I ever want to know. Knowledge is power and when you are spending you’re own hard earned dollars you want to know everything! My daughter does have an LD in both word retrieval, and decoding, so I’m not sure it’s the program for us. She does very good work with draft builder so we will stick to that for now. Thanks for the info.