WHAT's A GOOD PIECE OF VOICE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE?

I've tried Dragon. Requires lots of training, but I don't see how it could be otherwise--we all speak differently...

Im familiar with dragon, is there a version 2 or 3? cause no.1 was a bitch to get with my voice patterns.

There's a version 9 right now!

In the interests of full disclosure, I used to work for the company that makes Dragon. It's a decent program.

The best things you can do to increase recognition accuracy:

• Train, train and then train some more. The program has to get to know you.
  
• Try to dictate with the smallest amount of ambient noise possible, as in, not while in a moving car or on a busy street or with the radio on in the background. You wouldn't (well, maybe you would) believe what some people do while dictating.
  
• Enunciate. E. g. for a lot of people, particularly in the South, pin sounds like pen.
  
• Don't pause for too long in the middle of a word, or add in ah, er, eh and other pause fillers, or else it will end up like something you don't expect. If you say, I ate three pieces of pie but it sounds like I ate uh three pieces of pie it can be recognized as I ate eighty-three pieces of pie.

Oh, and be male and from the midwest -- they get the best recognition scores. A woman from the Northeast, such as myself, doesn't do as well. Worst accent? The Indian accent speaking English. Very, very tough for the program.

Doesn't the latest version of Dragon claim to work out of the box?

Dragon certainly gets the best reviews - but one thing to consider is that it is resource-intensive; to use it effectively, you're gonna need a relatively up-to-date, fast machine with lotsa memory ... another consideration is that your choice of whichever of its various versions, ranging in price from under $100 to around $1000, will dictate (pardon the pun) which applications will take dictation. For most folks, the 2 lower-priced versions, "Standard" and "Preferred" will prolly suffice, though neither are compatible with Outlook or PowerPoint, and of the 2, only "Preferred" is compatible with Excell. Compatibility with Lotus apps comes in for quite a bit of negative comment also - so be advised.


If you're considering the near-term purchase of a new 'puter, or upgrading your current machine to Windows Vista, you might find Vista's integrated voice-recognition feature will do what you want done. Initial reports are that its very good, and some reviewers have opined it may even be a "Dragon Slayer".

woo hoo. We were in the process of leasing a bunch of new puters and I want to go solely with VRS for my style of writing. One of our associates took dictation and Ive always found that I can get right to the point in report writing. Otherwise I load up with clauses beneath clauses. It gets so bad that I begin to sound like one of our English friends crossed with Jack Kerouac. The person who took dictation could smooth out all the needed phrases and my writing would be recieved well.

I once did a report using the very early version of Dragon and i had a section about finding congeners of PCBs in our mine compressorwastewaters . The software heard every PCB reference as "pieces of Beef" and I didnt catch em all, so my audience was , confused wherever it showed up. Poor editing on my behalf, I know, but it was funny to tell the story over tini's at the bar.