I’ve been using speech recognition for over 10 years, starting first with IBM’s Viavoice and then through several versions of Dragon Naturallyspeaking. The PC I mainly use now has Vista and I was very reluctant to pay for yet another Dragon update; version 8 won’t run under Vista and it would cost about £100 for the upgrade. So I decided to try the speech recognition facilities included in Vista.
It’s not quite as accurate as Dragon Naturallyspeaking, but that’s only to be expected as I’ve invested years in training the Naturallyspeaking speech files. In the few days I’ve been using Windows Speech Recognition, though, its accuracy has improved considerably. If it continues to improve then I’m certain I won’t need to fork out for the Dragon update.
2 Comments
Perhaps it was the quality of the microphone that I used, but my tinkering with Windows Vista’s voice recognition option was considerably less pleasant than yours. To say it was frustratingly ineffectual would be an understatement even after I invested a couple of hours talking to my laptop. It is however interesting to note that it is roughly comparable to a commercial offering. Keep us up to date with how it goes for you
Thanks for the comment. You do need a good quality microphone. If you were using the built in microphone on a laptop, it’s unlikely that that would give you good results with any speech recognition program.
Post a Comment