I have a friend who is legally blind and she said she would like to send more emails or letters to people. She’s not a typist and says the magnification on her computer is a pain to use.
I was wondering if any of the voice recognition programs would help and how they work and the approximate cost of it?
I have no idea how well it works, but Windows 10 has voice recognition and text-to-speech built into it. All you have to do is enable it. If you already own Windows 10, the additional cost is $0. Windows 8 has some accessibility options in it as well, but I don’t recall which ones it has. I know Windows 8 has the screen magnifier and text-to-speech, but I’m not sure it has the voice recognition.
I don’t know if Microsoft is still offering it, but they were offering a free upgrade to Windows 10 from older versions of Windows for anyone who needs the accessibility functions. I don’t know if this free upgrade is still available.
There are some high-contrast screen themes available as well that can make the screen easier to read for those who have impaired vision.
FTR, Windows has supported voice recognition since at least Windows 7, but I, too, can’t say how good it is. I recently looked into this for someone who I think ended up not pursuing it, but I’ve heard that one of the better commercial products is Dragon Naturally Speaking. The Pro versions are fairly expensive but there are cheaper consumer versions that all use the same engine.
I have been told that the voice recognition programs take a lot of memory. I wonder if an external hard drive could be used.
I’ve, also, been told that there are apps from the blind asso. that will help. I guess their insurance will help. Thanks for your help.
Memory ≠ Hard drive.
I can’t imagine any modern computer that couldn’t run voice recognition software out-of-the-box.
I use Dragon and it works pretty well for me. It is far from perfect though and even when it’s ‘trained’ it still makes errors; easy enough for me to correct but harder for someone with vision problems. I have no idea how good the Microsoft product is.
In practice, using any kind of speech-to-text software needs a quiet room and a good mic.
That’s true, but I’m not sure if voice recognition qualifies for it, since it’s been a standard Windows feature since (IIRC) Vista. Basically: forever in computer time.
But yeah, just turn it on and give it a go. There’s very little to lose by trying it. It’ll ask you to read a few paragraphs when you first set it up, and from that point on it’s supposed to be self-training and accuracy should improve with use.
Any reasonably modern computer will suffice, and modern versions of both Windows and Mac have it built in. You don’t need the standalone programs unless your needs are more along the line of editing (things like “get rid of that last sentence”) than simple dictation.
You don’t even need a computer; smartphones are more than capable of that these days, too.
Although smartphones usually do most of the speech processing in the cloud: It’s not actually your phone doing the voice recognition, but a big computer somewhere at Google or Apple.
I don’t think that this is the case. I just put my phone (galaxy s7) in airplane mode and I could compose email bye speaking to the phone. It worked fine without sending anything to the cloud.
Windows 10 PC
“Hey cortana, send an email to Bob”
OK WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY TO BOB
“Hi Bob you ugly old fart, how’s it going”
OK THIS IS WHAT I HAVE
HI BOB YOU UGLY OLD FART. HOW IS IT GOING
IS THIS OK?
“Yes”
OK SENDING EMAIL TO BOB
She may need someones help getting cortana set up, sync’d to her contacts
can even sync to her phone if she likes, but it is doable
I think you can teach Dragon to open apps etc on voice command as well
just dont have any experience with it
My response to your message here is being typed using the speech to text feature that is built into every Macintosh computer from Apple. The only thing I added was a USB Samson microphone. I believe the cost was about $40.
By the way, very nice of you to help out your friend 
Now that I do a better job reading this post. I should have composed it on my phone. It probably would not have made the stupid spelling mistake that I did.