Users of Office XP: do you use Voice Recognition? What's it like?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m using WinXP Home. I use MS Office a lot, especially Word, but i’m still running Office 2000. Apparently, Office XP has voice recognition capabilities, and i was wondering if anyone here is using that particular function, and how useful it is on a day-to-day basis.

My computer is certianly powerful enough to run the program (P4 3.0, 1Gig memory), and i believe that the only other stuff i need to run the voice recognition software is a soundcard, which i have (Soundblaster 5.1) and a headphone/microphone combination (which i would need to buy).

The main reason that i’m wondering about this is that i can get Office XP outrageously cheaply through my university. For the most part, i’m very happy with Office 2000 and normally wouldn’t bother changing, but the idea of being able to control the program by voice is quite appealing.

So, what i want to know is: How useful would this be to me? I’m not the world’s fastest typist, and i also like the idea of being able to activate commands by voice without using the mouse. This would certainly reduce the strain on my right wrist and hand. How much can you do with Office XP’s voice recognition? Is it worth the upgrade?

Also, is there any other hardware/software that i’d need that i may not be aware of?

Any opinions/advice appreciated.

2

About a year ago, I got disgusted that I spend too long in the car every day. Since alot of what I do involves writing things, I figured I could get a handheld voice recorder and record stuff on the way to work, then run it through a voice recognition program at work and save some time typing things.

Turns out this doesn’t work, or at least it doesn’t for me for a couple reasons:

a) it turns out that (for me at least), verbal communication is much different than written. I say um to much, especially while I’m thinking out loud which was basically what I was doing for this thing. Also, I often don’t use complete sentences when talking.

b) Back before computers, you’d think out what you wanted to say, have it all organized, and then type it up, basically having everything worked out before you began typing it. Computers changed all that. Now you can (or at least I do) start somewhere in the middle, move up and add something relevant before that, and after you’ve got some content, re-arrange it as necessary. It turns out I do a lot of that, even in simple documents. Talking is purely a serial thing. It just won’t accomodate the dynamic nature of what writing is on a computer.

c) The technology sucks. It’s way better than it was 10 years ago. It’s good enough that it’ll capture with 95% or better accuracy. Which sounds great. Until you do the math and realize that means about every other sentence will require a correction. And the corrections aren’t typically what you’d expect, simple word changes, like you say “dog” and it types “fog”. Instead, it’ll mesh two or more words together and make the best guess it can which will be horrible. And it doesn’t do a great job of figuring out where sentences begin and end. I ended up spending most of my time trying to figure out what the heck I was talking about.

Now, you can do control things with voice recognition that are pretty accurate. You can for example say “start word”, “open file”, or “cursor down”, and it will do very well. Personally, I found this to be cool in concept, but absolutely useless in practice. It’s so much faster to just push the right keys. For usage by disabled people, the appeal is exciting, but I’m fortunately not in that boat.

3

There is a Dilbert cartoon that made me never want to use voice recognition for this. Dilbert is standing behind Wally, who is bragging about his voice recognition system. Dilbert says, loudly “Delete all files.”

No thanks, I’ll stay with my fingers. Good to get an input on how the word processor voice recognition works, though.

4

I just happened to see that cartoon the other day. As Dilbert (Dilbert was the one with the software and Wally was jealous) starts swearing over losing his files, Wally says “Please, not in front of the computer.”

I’ve see the software in action, and person alley ice in kits a peas a ship.

5

My dad had a stroke last year and while he mostly recovered he lost some dexterity in his hands such that typing is a major hassle for him. Sadly, my dad lives to write (not novels but all sorts of other things) and this drives him crazy.

So, being the family computer geek I bought him Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software. Mostly it has been a complete bomb.

I set it up and played with it awhile and it is pretty cool at first blush. The technology is indeed much better than it was a few years ago. Unfortunately it is still dodgy unless you become very practiced at it. While you can talk “normally” (not – talk – like – this) you have to make a very conscious effort to avoid things like clearing your throat, saying “uhm”, keeping your volume properly modulated, enunciating everything, make sure the dog doesn’t bark, your SO doesn’t yell a question at you from the other room and so on. Further, you need to get in the habit of pointing out to the computer where punctuation goes and to me that throws off the train of thought on what you are writing. Finally, I found I had to look away from the screen while doing it as there is a lag between what you say and the computer writing it out. Naturally I am readiung what it is writing and having my train of thought 5 seconds ahead of what I am reading really screws me up. Thing is, if you don’t read as it goes and it gets something wrong you don’t know it. Sure you could go back and correct but sometimes the computer gets something way wrong and the problems seem to snowball making most everyting that follows an unreadable mess and you spend a long time getting it all back into shape. Also, if whatever you are typing as a lot of special formatting (inents, bold, centering, etc.) you usually find yourself back at the keyboard anyway making it happen. Yes, that can all be controlled by voice command but it is so much slower that way and dodgy again that you skip it and are back to the mouse and keyboard.

I suppose with a lot of practice and discipline it could work fine. Certainly for people who cannot type for one reason or another it is great (sadly my dad has a zero tolerance learning curve and does things like clear his throat a lot and so on so it is mostly useless for him). But frankly the whole thing gives no benefit I see as I can type faster than I can talk to it and I have gotten so used to writing via keyboard I see no real reason to change as even when working ideally it lends little to no advantage.

6

I use it for menu bar commands in Word, Excel and Access. I’m not sure it’s easier than mousing, but I think it’s neat.

7

Thanks for the advice, folks. It seems like it probably isn’t worth upgrading to Office XP just to get voice recognition capability, especially given that i’d have to buy a headset as well.

I have been thinking about getting a headset in order to subscribe to a VOIP service, and if i do that then maybe i’ll upgrade Office just for the hell of it.

Thanks again.

8

It’s interesting that you should mention this because ideas set up the voice recognition on my own computer couple days ago. You can judge for yourself how well it’s working though ran through the training sessions and everything seemed to be okay although I’m longer passages there did seem to be a problem and adding them to additional are rather remember it had come Trisha, is always obnoxious. Break

It certainly does take some getting used to that time that it really forces you to think about what your going to say and you have to practice your diction women effort to allay the invariable loans and Haase the term words into other 2ft. things Reid

As excited as I was to start doing this in a single profit taken off computer another couple days if it doesn’t get much better

9

OKAY, LET’S PUT IT TO THE TEST. I’ve printed YOUR quote first and the passage written by Dragon Preferred 7 below that.

YOU:

I suppose with a lot of practice and discipline it could work fine. Certainly for people who cannot type for one reason or another it is great (sadly my dad has a zero tolerance learning curve and does things like clear his throat a lot and so on so it is mostly useless for him). But frankly the whole thing gives no benefit I see as I can type faster than I can talk to it and I have gotten so used to writing via keyboard I see no real reason to change as even when working ideally it lends little to no advantage.
DRAGON:

I suppose with a lot of practice and disciplined it could work fine. Certainly for people who cannot type for one reason or another . it is great. (Sadly, my dad has a zero tolerance learning curve and does things like clear his throat a lot, and so on so it is mostly useless for him.), but frankly, the whole thing gives no benefit. I see, as I can type faster than I can talk to it and I have gotten so used to writing via keyboard . I see no real reason to change as even when working ideally it lends little to no advantage.
VERY VERY CLOSE. I read yours verbatim–and version 8 is 25 percent more accurate. Here’s the lowdown: Dragon is good when it’s good and bad otherwise. You have to position the microphone exactly right. It has trouble with like-sounding words. Punctuation is spotty. Sometimes it mangles words terribly. The example above was stunningly good, but I’ve seen it so bad I could scream–and it doesn’t have to have that many mistakes to the a RPITA.

If you’re looking to transcribe notes, it’s maybe good enough. If you’re looking to dictate letters, wait 10 more years. The medical field has great success with Dragon, but their vocabulary is specialized and much smaller.

Dragon offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.