UKC

Hello,

I have for sometime been thinking about buy some speech recognition software to help with writing at home or at work. I wonder if any UKC folk regularly utilise Speech recognition software to help write reports etc. I have tried searching for antidotal usage and only seem to find webpages trying to sell the product. Would be great to hear from people that use the software who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. The software for my mac is expensive and before purchasing it I would like to find out is it as good as they say. Actually any firsthand experience would be greatly appreciated.

Well at least when I walk around the garden talking to myself I could tell the wife I am actually dictating a great work (which I am, it just doesn't get recorded at the moment )

In reply to Jamie Simpson - Alpine Dragons:
My understanding (from a position of some ignorance) is that 'natural' speech recognition - i.e. capturing the meaning of 'normal' conversations - is fiendishly difficult, very expensive and not very reliable. This is not least because we don't break up sentences when we speak naturally - if you record a normal conversation and then replay it graphically you can't actually see where the breaks between the different words are; our brains are constantly guessing what the other person is trying to say and make the breaks for us. (This I think is one of the reasons that older people are sometimes diagnosed as being hard of hearing when in fact part of the problem is that they are becoming more distant from everyday culture and idiom so fail to anticipate successfully.)

HOWEVER if you are wanting software that you can dictate to - that - is - take - care - to - enunciate - each -word - in - turn - not unreasonably if you are dictating great thoughts! then I would have though even standard voice recognition that is built into Windows would work perfectly well.

In reply to Jamie Simpson - Alpine Dragons:

I have used Dragon Dictate over many versions for nearly 20 years. partly for tendonitis partly for dyslexia

As the tendons are now fine I use it less. Just really big jobs. Here are my pros and cons

Cons

Need to learn to say what you want written. This can be quite hard
Needs a quite room with no one else to annoy
Takes time to load and set up each time.
Takes time to train on first set up. Say an hour of reading and letting it scan your documents
It's a pain correcting errors properly so the software learns

Pros

The current software is very good and fast.
leaves both hands free for say handling source material

The one in google docs is Ok and worth trying. But isn't as good as dragon dictate. If you have an employer maybe ask if they ill buy it

Finally typing or dictating, get software to read what you wrote back to you. Word can do this