Speech to Text software

[Gaz]

I'm looking into investing in some speech to text software. So far, the research that I've done on this has pointed me to Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Has anyone used this, or does anyone have an alternative that I could look into as Dragon is a substantial investment.

[Starman]

Gaz:

I tried Dragon Naturally Speaking; to me, speech to text technology, in general doesn't seem far enough along to make me trade keyboard for microphone. I've tried several products but all aren't as smooth as I'd like them to be. If you retrain yourself to talk extremely clearly with perfect pronounciatoin, it helps. Sometimes no matter how well you speak, the software just can't get it correct. This happens frequently enough to make Speech-2-Text a break-even trade at best. If you're handicapped or really bad with the keyboard, it might be worth it though.

My Windows Vista and some XP systems have Speech to text built-in.

The microphone is a critical component, as important as the software. It's so sensitive that trading one mic for another can render the whole thing useless. Dragon Naturally Speaking comes with its own mic and demands that you use it, not your own. They're right: theirs works better with their software, but the microphone headset is stupid, uncomfortable to wear, and not one you'd choose to use.

Good luck.

[Gerto]

Originally Posted by Gaz

I'm looking into investing in some speech to text software. So far, the research that I've done on this has pointed me to Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Has anyone used this, or does anyone have an alternative that I could look into as Dragon is a substantial investment.

I've used Dragon in the past and, after a training period of training the program, was really happy with the results. It's not perfect , but I really liked to use it while keeping a diary: You can just sit back and speak out your thoughts instead of having to spend half of your toughts on the typing / writing part.

Don't know about any other programs. Good luck though!

[ragtag]

I've used Windows speech to text in WinXP Tablet PC edition. I believe it's pretty much the same as the one in Vista. Had to train it some, but it was still getting a lot of stuff wrong. With the built in microphone on my laptopt, it was pretty hopeless, but with a better microphone it was passable. Though, I'm a fast typist and can probably type quite a bit faster than it would take me to speak the text and correct all the errors afterwards.

[TaylorLord]

I would call myself an expert, I use text to speech everyday. A lot of programs are cheap to buy, its the voice packs that are expensive. Dragon naturally speaking along with being expensive, a handful of the voices don't say words correctly and some of them will even skip over the words entirely!

The best program I used and still use is this program you can try for free called "TextAlloud". I downloaded the voice "sam" which isn't the most real sounding, but he says things the most clear with great accuracy.

Textalloud has all sorts of options too. For example you can have a text file saved as an mp3 and listen to it on a cd or ipod. I love it so maybe you will to!

Check out Textalloud here!

[Daffy Duck]

Originally Posted by TaylorLord

I would call myself an expert, I use text to speech everyday.

Text to speech is different than Speech to text.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is your best bet, but the technology is far from perfect.

[TaylorLord]

Daffy lol i must be dyslexic I got all excited about someone talking about speech to text that I read it backwords my bad.

On windows vista microsoft has a nice speech to text program that comes with the OS. I use it for blog entries here and there in fact Steve posted a good article about this subject here!