Does anyone use (english) speech recognition to form their emails or God forbid, postings ? What package do you use and how effective and accurate is it ?

I am faced with typing a large report, and would much rather dictate it to someone that doesn't argue or do their nails throughout.

dave

Does it need to function after a Talacker event?

The issue with many of these packages, as I remember, is that you need to spend an age training them.

...you are of course right: even then after having finished their nails, they just sit there and discuss with their colleague where they're going at the weekend.

dave

Someone I know likes Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I have no nails to speak of, let alone 'do'. And I don't argue with a recording.

Send me your recording and I'll type it all up.
I only ask for CHF30 for every 400 words. Will even check for typos.

I used Dragon Naturally Speaking about 8 years ago and it was very impressive then, so I assume it's come along significantly since. You could use the system "untrained" but you'd get much better results with training. People expect miracles from speech recognition and it's a bit unfair really.

With a limited vocabulary and well-defined grammar constructs however, dragon naturally speaking really did deliver the miracles that people expected, and disbelief was the general reaction when demoing our product (air traffic control software).

However, if you just want to dictate then be warned that it'll be a tedious process at the start but will improve significantly over time. Bet you end up just typing it as you drive, rather than the "dictating to your laptop" that I bet you're dreaming of :-)

Not wishing to take issue with your service, but you have just reminded me of those doctors that send their patient notes as compressed audio around the world for typing up, and get them back the next day. Pretty cool, unless there are confidentiality or security issues involved.

dave

A lot of it (what I do) is very jargon-laden so once I have the vocab trained into the unit, I imagine it will be pretty good. Now all I need to do is get Hal to open the cargo-bay doors.

dave

I was pleased with Naturally Speaking when I tried in in 1997. I bought the UK version so didn't have to imitate an American accent.

But at the end of the day, I preferred listening to music or Radio 4 and using the keyboard.

By the way, you can get some entertaining effects by putting a coffee cup down on your desk.

*shrug*
You know who to call on when you're at your wits' end and don't have the time to 'train' software or, at the end of the day's accounting, you're not willing to spend a thousand francs or so on it.

I was a feature writer and a copy editor, so you can imagine the typing quality wouldn't be too deplorable.

OK Thanks. I have also considered the infinite-number-of-monkeys option but finding sufficient typewriters, and meeting the deadline was too daunting.

dave

since i can probably type at 50 words a minute, that means i could do 450 words in 9 minutes. Add in maybe 1 minute for corrections using my handy spellchecker, so every 10 minutes i could theoretically do 450 words. argus offered to do every 400 words per 30 francs.

special offer for you dave, i will do 400 words for chf 28.50.

nice little earner methinks.

A spellchecker is limited in its use.

I can imagine someone typing "... wait, scratch that. Back up to the previous sentence..." and the spellchecker not catching it -- or DaveA's witty/scathing asides not meant for the report.

Mmm... competition! It's a free market after all.

DaveA, your call: quality or (possibly dubious) quantity?

Years and years ago, I spent ages training the <cough>OS/2<cough> voice recognition stuff. It never got more than 85% accurate. However if I pretended to have an American accent, the accuracy shot up to around 95%.

I never found it to be very useful to be honest, as I could only do a reliable accent on simple words.

Doesn't WinXP or Vista have voice recognition as an add-on?

I have heard good things about the Dragon Naturally Speaking stuff, but never used it myself.

I think you really need a good microphone, perhaps one of those headset ones.

cheers,
(Mr)Wibble.

My version of Naturally Speaking came with a one-eared headset, which was a bit strange, and if I remember correctly a separate microphone.

Here's a review of NaturallySpeaking from David Pogue from the New York Times. He's used the program for years and loves it.

Great stuff. I particularly liked this:

"The Preferred perk is voice macros, where you teach it to type one thing when you say another. For example, you can say “forget it” and have the software spit out, “Thank you so much for your inquiry. Unfortunately, after much consideration, we regret that we must decline your application at this time.”

Anyone want to propose content for the <lazy poster> macro ?

dave

You can say, "Kill her!"

and it'd spit out: "We regret to inform you that your inferior typing and superior nail-care and conversational skills are no longer suitable for the corporate environment and high output of this establishment. Please clear your desk by 5.30pm and return the office door key to your immediate superior. We wish you all the best in your future undertakings."

Hire argus Dave, those speech recognition and text-to-speech software are not yet ready for the task.


And probably wouldn't recognise your accent after some pints today at the Talacker.