I have a friend whom is now paralised from the neck down due to a plane crash. Is/are there programs out there for someone like this so that they can still converse via e-mail? I was stumped when I went to yahoo, didn’t know what to ask for.
You are looking for Vioce recognition software. 2 products are currently on the market that are very good. The first is by Dragon System, it is called “Dragon Naturally Speaking”, the 2nd is by IBM and I don’t recall the name of the product, but I know it is very highly rated. Keep in mind that the system requirements for these are pretty steep and that neither of them are going to be 100%, but it could be a good alternative for your friend.
-Dragwyr
“If God had meant for man to eat waffles,
he would have given him lips like snowshoes”
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Yes. Like the ‘Speak and Type’ program advertised on television and AOL. You wear a headset and talk and it prints what you say. The only problem with such programs is that you need not only to speak clearly, but you also have to add in the punctuation and spaces. They didn’t mention that in the ads. At the end of a sentence, you need to say ‘period, space, capitol’ and then continue on.
I think the program works pretty well for what people want it to do.
Mark
“Think of it as Evolution in action.”
I have to chime in on this because I have tried most of the products out there and they all suck!
Consumer reports did a whole story about this last year and they concluded the same thing.
My latest adventure was with L & H Voice Express.
Mostly the way these things work is they have you read a fair amount of text into the system to adjust for accent, slurring of speech, etc. for different parts of the country. Then they allow you to add non-sense words that you use (including swear words) so it can recognize that as well. Every program on the market claims they work wonders, but after spending hours with a number of them, I can tell you about one in every twenty words needs some kind of correction. And you have to be careful to enuciate every word and usually have to talk a little slower than normal to boot. It is far from natural speech.
Dragon is probably the best one of what’s out there, but I’d recommend one of those e-mail programs that allows you to send speech over a ‘voice-to-text’ software package any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
If someone else has a different opinion, and has actually found one of these that works, I’d like to know about it too. Of course, maybe it’s just that us Southern Californians talk like idiots, and the programs just aren’t optimized for our speech patterns.
PC Magazine just did a comprehensive review of speech recognition programs. See:
Speech Recognition for an online copy of the full review.
Finally, a topic on speech recognition, a field I can claim to know something about. Why? I am doing my grad study in Speech Recognition.
Speech Recogntion Technology has kind of balanced out among ALL commercial products. Dragon, L&H, IBM dont have VERY different products. The core recognition software is pretty much the same.
To have your speech recognizer do well, you have to TRAIN it to your particular accent, speaking rate, etc etc. This is usually 2-5 hours of speaking patiently to the computer. After that, you will see a quantum leap in the recognition accuracy (the comp should acheive over 90% accuracy).
This WILL work. Trust me.
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What I’m waiting for is a speech recognition plug-in for my browser. All you would have to do is speak the text of a link, like “General Questions” or “Great Debates”, and it would be activated; for non-text links like pictures, use the Tab function. I get so tired pushing my mouse around, I just want to mount a big 19 inch monitor over my Lazy Boy, put on the headset and surf away. Now if I could just get intravenous Snapple and Cheesy Poofs…
TT
“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide
Hey Ramesh,
I did spend several hours with L & H Voice Express just a few months ago, and I swear the more additional words I added to the library, the worse it got. The problem is that the grammer we use in speech isn’t always the same in written language. The program is set up to understand that, and as a consequence makes plenty of errors that I would think a five year old would know were out of context. This was especially common with words that sounded alike or similar such as there and their, meet and meat, and even sheet, shit, and Shi’ite.
I guess I agree with you about it being 90% accurate, but personally, 1 in 10 words being wrong (that would be 90%) is unacceptable to me and the rest of the world IMHO.
Also, know what the differing software has different functions. From what I understand, some of the programs are only useful in specific programs, such as word processing. Whereas other more advanced (and expensive) software will allow you to pretty much do away with your mouse and keyboard as you milti-task.
Yer pal,
Satan
“I did spend several hours with L & H Voice Express just a few months ago, and I swear the more additional words I added to the library, the worse it got.”
That makes sense, right? The more words you add the more mistakes the recognizer makes.
“I guess I agree with you about it being 90% accurate, but personally, 1 in 10 words being wrong (that would be 90%) is unacceptable to me and the rest of the world IMHO.”
We are talking 90% (optimistically, I would predict 95%) upwards here. And unless you are a professional stenographer, I would be surprised if you had > a 90% typing accuracy (I mean without going back to correct your errors…).
I am NOT saying speech recognition is infallible. To think that speech reocgnition will do away with keyboards is stupid. But it can certainly be helpful.
Hoping the above will be helpful…
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The problem is simply that computers can’t think! Human language has to be intelligently interpreted, and the best a computer can do is compare the input to a long, long list of rules of thumb, and crank out a response. That said, I do think that given enough sheer number crunching power and a few million man-years of debugging, we’ll eventually see something that’s “good enough”.
My really old ATARI could do speech recognition. That was fun. That was like 1980 or sumthin. With a Convox speech thing.
All speech programs have to be taught. That can take hours.
Also, background noise can significantly effect the quality.
But then look at Stephen hawkin he has a computer that talks FOR him, but you have to have some control there.
I saw an IBM rep demonstrating their ViaVoice product at Epcot Center last year and I was really impressed. (Of course, this is a very expensive program and the guy using it had been trained up the wazoo, I assume.) One of the things that impressed me most was that it recognised which spelling was needed for similar sounding words. For instance: “Which witch is which?” As well as deciphering when to use a “.” for “period” and when to use the word “period.” Example: You would say “They scored in the last period, period.” And it would spell out the first and print the second as punctuation. It worked great for him, but I’m guessing it takes a lot of work with it to get to that level.
If its confused on to, two, too, then the program asks you for clarification or lists those words & you select which one you want with another word.
Does anyone have up to date experience of using these themselves? I did look at the review, but the review date was a lot later than the thread date & I wondered if anyone has used them recently. Also the review uses very simple standard tests & real wrinkles/problems tend to come out in day-to-day use.
I’m thinking of trying some of this software & wondered if anyone had any preferences Dragon vs ViaVoice.
Thanks.
I bought the Dragon speech recognition software and used it for a while but I got tired of it because it took longer to correct the text than to type it in. For normal people I do not think this type of software is useful but for someone who cannot type it may be useful. Just be aware that it really does need a lot of patience and correcting.
My sister got Dragon Natural Speaking last year when she went away to college; she’s severely dyslexic, and my father thought it would be a great help to her in writing reports and such.
Having fooled with it a bit- it’s a bitch-and-a-half. You need to spend a lot of time training it. You also need a great deal of patience; even after spending months training it, you can still expect regular errors out of it.
Still, if that’s the only way you can use a computer, then by all means go for it. It ain’t perfect, but it works. But if you’re just looking for something to make your life a little more convenient- this just isn’t worth it yet.
So I see a post from markSerlin and I’m like, WTF?!? Then i see a post from ME!!!
I hate it when new threads get pushed to the top…
Yer pal,
Satan
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These answers are weird. First of all, any organization for that sort of handicap has an extensive list of equipment that they can use. IBM has an excellent resource, for example.
Sorry Satan, it got pushed to the top because I have developed RSI & since I have bills to pay etc still need to work… I was considering voice software as a way to avoid doing more damage to already inflamed tendons…but wanted personal experience rather than impersonal reviews as you only really find out how a system is by using it yourself normally for a while. I didn’t want to commit the cardinal sin of asking for information without having at least looked myself (odd telling Satan you wanted to avoid sinning 
…), and found this rather elderly thread.
Handy, I hope this explains why I was looking here rather in any organisation - I know that there is an organisation in my area for RSI sufferers, but won’t get the info till at least tomorrow (& meetings may be monthly or less frequent, so I turned to the masses).
Thanks for responses anyway,
Fi.