Computer voice recognition packages

[Argus]

Due to an up-coming shoulder operation, I shall be a one armed bandit for a while.

......But I prefer the term "mono-dexter".

Unfortunately it is my right arm, being right handed, and I will not be able to use it for several week. Obviously woodwork is out of the question pro tem, but how about my trusty laptop?

It strikes me that I could get a lot of written work done.....but left handed typing is slow. My question is,

Does a voice recognition package work well?
Are they any good?
Has anyone any experiences, good or bad? I tend to use Microsoft office, word and excel a lot... are they worth the money?

Any shared experiences would be well received.

 

[Signal]

Argus.

Sorry to here about the op, hope all is and will be ok

In the past I have had experience of Dragon Dictate and IBM
True Voice, I think thats what its called now any way.

Both worked suprisingly well though you do need a reasonably
speced machine with a minimum of 256MB ram and a decent
sound card. I have found that the onboard sound cards dont
generally perform as well as add in cards, seems to be to much
crosstalk from the busses.

The down side is the amount of training any softwre like this takes.
Dragon for example reqires you to dictate some quite lengthy passages.
That said once this is done it works great.

Goog luck with the operation

Signal

 

[CYC]

I have used Dragon speech a long time ago, and I agree with Signal's review: It takes a long time to train the software but it is worth it in the end as it works very well. If you are using Word a lot this is perfect.
I used it about 5 years ago and I am sure it has dramatically improved since.

Using a laptop you won't be able to upgrade your sound card, so this part will remain unpredictable.

 

[Argus]

Thank you both for that.

Certainly food for thought.

 

[Anonymous]

As a PostScript to both of your replies, after the operation I am still unable to use my right arm but I suspect that movement will return in due course, so thank you both for your kind wishes.
I did in fact buy a copy of IBM ViaVoice, because it was affordable, and uses a simple USB connection, which is an advantage on a laptop. Initially everything worked quite well. The specification on my machine is more than adequate to deal with this programme, and the initiation process wasn't too onerous. I got the whole thing sorted out and working in about an hour, without too many mistakes.
One thing that I didn't know at this point (and neither did anybody else) was how well the package would work on my laptop. And the first problem occurred when I kept getting conflicting macros in Microsoft Word.
Anyway, after getting in touch with ScanSoft, who support this programme in the UK, and a couple of days of e-mails backwards and forwards with them, they suddenly found that Adobe state that ViaVoice 10 is incompatible with Adobe Acrobat PDF maker and some other programs. This fact was buried in one of the technical bulletins on Adobe's web site. (I should point out that most of my work ends up as a PDF file and some time or another). Problem solved-and full marks to ScanSoft who stayed with a particularly baffling problem for them throughout. The incompatibility issue was as much of a surprise to them as it was to me.
After taking the IBM ViaVoice package back to the supplier with all supporting evidence, I swapped it for Dragon Seven and I found that the results have been excellent-in fact I'm writing this note using the Dragon voice package right now.
So, thanks for your help, I am now looking forward to resuming some proper woodwork as soon as I can.
Best wishes,
Argus