Yes, the thread title says pretty much all I have to say. I am writing this all using a headset and Dragon speech recognition of not yet had to make a correction. Though I should have, as in the last sentence should have ended, “…, I’ve not yet had to make a correction.” I could just as easily have fixed the sentence with verbal commands instead of spoken an additional correction as an additional sentence.
I have to do a few things manually. I can’t dictate directly into fields on webpages. When I try to do so, Dragon opens something called a “dictation box”, where it records my dictation – – later I have to hit a button on the box called “transfer” to copy and paste my dictation on to the webpage into whatever field I’ve clicked on.
So the sequence of what I’ve written so far is:
I opened Google Chrome verbally with Dragon.
I went to this new thread page manually.
I clicked on the title field, and spoke the title. (Dragon automatically opened the dictation box.)
I clicked the transfer button to move my spoken title into the title field.
I’ve been speaking ever since, until right now when I will click on the field that contains the body of the text and hit transfer again.
I manually clicked on the link in the email to come to this thread again, and manually hit the reply button, and when I began speaking my response, Dragon opened the dictation box again. I’ve been speaking since
I have a fairly new computer it’s a Dell 15 inch Inspiron laptop. (I had to spell Inspiron for it the first time. But it has already learned the word Inspiron, so I didn’t have to spell it again for this parenthetical comment.) It has a 2.4 GHz processor and 6 GB of RAM.
This software requires a minimum 1 GHz processor, though it recommends 2.2 GHz. It requires a 2 MB L2 processor cache, whatever that is, and 4 GB of free hard disk space. It will work on Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows Vista.
Oh, and I stopped dictating in order to go look up the system requirements for the program.
Okay not exactly homophones, but it took it without needing any correction.
I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream. (It also took this dictation without needing correction.)To be completely honest, I probably enunciated the sentence a bit more carefully than I would have speaking to another person.
… Oops, I did go back in manually and change “now exactly” to “not exactly.” That’s a pretty unusual slip – – it would not normally mistake not for now.
For the first day or so that I had the program, it was frequently using the wrong choices for two, too, and to. By now (I’ve only had this since Thursday) it’s pretty much figured out when I want to use which of the three words.
Um, it’s not all that great at formatting. However, you can select a range of words and make them all bold, all caps or capitalized, or all italics. As I just learned, when you try to use the formatting commands as text in your document, Dragon gets confused. But I can always say “spell that”, and speak the letters allowed to spell out anything confusing.
There’s probably more stuff I can do, but I’m still learning.
There’s also a bunch of commands that are special to Microsoft Word and WordPerfect – – things like new page, insert date, insert table, and so forth.
I should say that the program is significantly better at recognizing my words now than it was out of the box a few days ago. It learns and adapts your voice profile every time you use it to dictate.
If any of you want to try out speech recognition for free, it is built into Windows 7, and I believe Windows Vista as well. The only other thing you need is a microphone, which is probably built-in if you have a laptop. You can find speech recognition under “ease of access” in the control panel. I found Dragon was way better than Windows right out of the box in terms of correctly typing my words.
My understanding is that, yes, it would be confused by another person’s voice. It would probably understand most of it but wouldn’t do nearly as good a job on a random voice that it hasn’t been trained for.
I saw another thread talking about how it did not do well transcribing recording of a meeting with multiple people, for example. The multiple voices on this in the same stream of dictation confused it.
But I would guess that it was correct probably 80 or 85% of the time right out of the box, and probably well above 90% now. It’s supposed to be able to get up to 99% – – I’m not sure how long that will take. And I can tell that most of the mistakes are caused by me slurring my words slightly or changing my mind in the middle of a sentence and going in a different direction.
It also has some exercises that you can do to train the program. For example, it has samples of letters and speeches for you to say aloud so it can compare what you say to the actual text that it already knows.
Oh, and the Premium version has a feature I really like – – a terrific proofreading feature. It can play your dictation back through your headphones while it highlights the corresponding words in the document that it typed from the dictation. So it’s easy to tell if you either misspoke or the program mistranslated, or both.
And then all this dictation and text becomes part of your profile to reduce future errors.
Seriously? “Allergic to peanuts.” Either this is very mysterious or you’re just yanking shamelessly on my chain.
FYI, I’m still posting using Dragon. Also, if you didn’t already know, I have verbally say the words for punctuation – –period, comma, semi–colon, quotation marks, etc.
The voice recognition system where I work invariably transcribes it as “allergic to penis” the first time or two it hears it from each dictator. Once we edit it a couple of times, it figures it out.
Does Dragon recognize the meanings of words/phrases? If ours did I am sure this wouldn’t happen…
I’m not sure. That sentence gave me a lot of problems because I had to use the spell function to spell out all the punctuation marks and maybe I just missed the word.
No, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t recognize the meanings, but it does recognize common phrases and terms and capitalizes words accordingly. For instance if I say the US government, US is automatically spelled with capital letters. I read an inaugural speech by some president, including the phrase “House of Representatives”, and I didn’t have to tell it which words to put capitals on. Country names like France and Germany are also automatically capitalized.