I met KD on Valentines Day, blind date, we shacked up right away this spring and have been shacked up all summer. This is the real thing.
KD has Multiple Sclerosis and has become limited in her ability to type. She was using an on-screen keyboard with a mouse when I met her. One day I watched her type a short note to her mother, she spent hours on two paragraphs. The fact that she would even try swuch a thing impressedme. I told her that there had to be a better way and after a short search found ViaVoice. It was affordable and we decided to give it a try. We installed it the day it came and right away she was able to use its built in word processor to write letters to friends and family. We’ve only been working with it for 2 weeks, now, but it is a vast improvement over the onscreen keyboard. She can dictate a letter and make corrections in a fraction of the time possible before.
I hate that it seems tied to Microsoft but it seems to be adaptable to other software systems. We are learning togather, it’s fun.
That sounds great. How much is ViaVoice? I know quite a few people with MS who use a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It’s pretty expensive and they all complain that it doesn’t work so good. Be nice to pass something better along to them.
About 69 dollars plus shipping, new, not much different than Dragon and the quality might comparable to Dragon, I can’t make that judgement. It’s much better than an on-screen keyboard, the only thing we have to compare with.
ViaVoice is a product of IBM, licensed to ScanSoft. And Dragon Naturally Speaking is now one of their products too. In fact, since ScanSoft also owns the major IVR systems (SpeechWorks and Nuance), they are by far the most dominant speech recognition company in the industry.
I could never make ViaVoice work for me. I don’t know if it’s my accent, or my voice, if the program just doesn’t like me, but anything I dictated came out unintelligible. I tried reading the sample passages to it several times so it could learn my voice, but it just never clicked for me.
I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to write this post with. The more you use it the better it understand your voice, as long is you speak clearly and enunciate, which I don’t do very well, so it’s taking some time. I usually proofread before I hit submit any way. It’s better and much faster than using one finger. I don’t have MS, just loss of motor control on my right side. If ViaVoice is better, I might check it out.
