Re: Voice recognition

Nick Bell <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Does anyone use speech recognition software regularly on their Mac, and
if so which program do they recommend?

I use it from time to time: every month or so at the moment but it's
increasing in frequency.

I originally used ViaVoice but found it unstable on my old iBook and
quite slow and clunky. I recently switched to iListen which I find more
stable and better than ViaVoice for speech recognition.

The software depends on how well it can understand you. You have to
train it for a long time, reading huge chunks of Dracula or similar!
Also some accents are naturally easier for the software to understand
than others and take a shorter training time. Even then it will struggle
over some unfamiliar or obscure words and training is ongoing.

As far as I can gather Dragon for the PC has better voice recognition
quality. But I'm a Mac user so stick to the Mac programs.

I use this for disability purposes for times when my typing isn't
working due to neurological illness. Luckily I can still speak at those
times. The user interface can be a bit clunky though, especially if you
have to make corrections afterwards. I'd be very worried if I had to
rely completely on the voice recognition to control everything on the
computer. For now it's still a backup for occasional times.

Oh and Dragon (on Windows) and iListen (on the Mac) can both transcribe
from recorded files in e.g. WAV format. So if you have a digital
dictaphone or record into a sound program and save directly you can then
leave the voice recognition software transcribing your recording for
you. ViaVoice can't do this (well not the version I have): it can only
transcribe directly from speech as you sit there talking to it.

And you'll need a good microphone: sound quality is really important for
voice recognition. You can't for example record to an iPod with iTalk
and then transcribe from that: the recording quality is too poor for the
voice recognition software to be able to understand what's said. Most
voice recognition boxed packages come with microphones nowadays.

If you've got any other questions about this feel free to email me.

Good luck!

Viv Dunstan
.

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