If you are wondering what speech or voice recognition software is all about let’s discuss it. Voice recognition software is basically speaking into a microphone and the program types for you. Your words are typewritten into a word processing program. I am using Microsoft Word. This article is being dictated using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 home edition. This is the lowest price version of Dragon voice recognition software that you can use on your home computer. It does work fairly well and certainly types faster than the 25 to 30 words a minute that I can type using the hunt and peck method. I never could type this fast nor probably this accurately. So far so good.
It does take some getting used to, but the program does type with pretty good accuracy, and of course it types almost as fast as you can speak. They say that an adult speaks at a pace of about 150 words a minute. This may be rather fast for some people and slow for real motor mouths. There is some break-in of the program involved to get it to work properly. The program requires that you speak into the microphone that is placed about a half an inch from the corner of your mouth. You wear a headset with a microphone attached. It does work fairly well right out of the box. You can correct the program with voice commands. If you can’t type at all then the program is pretty good for you to use.
Perhaps the more advanced and more expensive professional versions of Dragon naturally speaking nine work better. There are legal and medical versions .This version being used cost $99. There was also a $40 rebate from Nuance Corporation and that will reduce the cost to a reasonable level for this voice recognition software. They also caution on the box that you have 1 GB of RAM for your computer. This computer has about three quarters of a gigabyte of RAM and occasionally does lock up or freeze. Nothing that more RAM might be able to solve. If you are planning to use it with Microsoft’s new Vista program you are out of luck. This version only works with Microsoft XP. Perhaps when Vista becomes debugged and more people use it then new versions will come out. Also Vista reportedly has its own version of voice recognition software built-in.
To be fair, the program, probably is about 90% accurate, and perhaps as close as 95% accurate. One thing that bugs me is that words come out misspelled with for instance, two nn or gg at the end, which can be annoying. I would have to fault the software as being just three quarters of a good program. There are too many faults for the real persnickety user. If you are finicky about the results and expect total accuracy then this program is not for you. I have been using it for about 45 days, and I do use it instead of wearing my fingers out typing. So basically I like the program and use it rather than type with two fingers. There is no way that I could’ve typed this many words as fast by myself.
If you have a problem with your fingers, wrists, or hands, then you may like using this voice recognition software. After a certain amount of training and use it moves along quite well. If you are a very fast typist of 40 words plus a minute, then you wouldn’t probably want this software. If you are going to keep your windows XP software on your computer for another few years and can get a good price then I would recommend it.
