You get the best results from a speech-to-text program that has you train it to your speech patterns. I use Dragon Naturally Speaking 12, and it’s more than 99% accurate after training it for about an hour and diligently correcting errors with the retrain word feature under the spell that correction function.
I haven’t gotten as bad as results as you did since before Dragon started numbering releases…
The typing speed depends on a. how fast your computer is and b. how fast you speak. I can talk faster than it will type for me so there’s a lag, but I’m told that people around here speak faster than most parts of the US (besides the upper mid-west).
Every version is better than the last, accuracy-wise. In the past month I’ve seen 12 for $40-50 at Staples and Best Buy. Rumor has it that version 13 will be out before Thanksgiving, so you might see 12 on sale for even cheaper later in the summer and into fall. But if you can get a cheap copy of 10 or 11, go for it and you should see accuracy well over 90% despite being older.
I thought an expensive microphone would be ideal, but I’ve gotten really good results from these, which work out to less than $2.50 each, at least as good as ones that cost me many times more than that and were high rated at the time.
Some speech to text is pretty decent. I just dictated two paragraphs into my Nexus 7 2013 using its built-in microphone and Android’s built-in feature.
I spoke slowly and distinctly (about one minute per paragraph), and said “comma” and “period” to insert punctuation. With plainer text, like search queries, speaking normally works fine. I substituted “period” for the dashes in the original, as I don’t think there’s a way to voice-dictate that punctuation character; it only recognizes about six special words. (Really it’s designed more for speaking search queries or emails than real dictation.)
And I read each paragraph all the way through in one go, with zero editing. In actual use, I’d do shorter chunks, and delete and redictate any with errors. I haven’t done a lot of dictating, though, and it was about this accurate on the first day I got it, with no training.
Presumably a commercial product would be at least as good as this free one included in a tablet, and no doubt recognize more special commands like “dash”. But the state of the art is way better than the result you got with Windows Vista.
Were you connected to the internet when you tried the Android programs? Mine don’t work without a connection, which is quite a PITA since I still haven’t found a way to drag my home cable around airports to hotels in the middle of nowhere. They did work better than my tries with windows-based ones otherwise.
Btw. be careful with that! Many people overdo it. With a vaguely modern system your goal should always remain fluent natural speech. Often people involuntarily talk to computers as if they were foreigners who are hard of hearing. That is likely to make life much harder for the software, leading to bad results. In fact it is such a common problem that there are even systems incorporating a whole second model for well-meaning artificial hyperarticulated speech.