Voice Recognition Software .... What would work best?

[Gary R]

Am thinking of getting a Voice recognition program, but not sure what to use.
Probably would't be used to surf the net, or operate the comp. by voice comand; main purpose would be writing a short story (or series of same). Not an author (as in published), but have ideas I want to work on, and was thinking that because of my 2-finger typing style, VR would be useful for this.
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Also--is there a limit to the size of a voice to text file?
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System is ..... W98SE (Ver 4.10.2222A); 1 GHz. Athlon Thunderbird Processor; 32 Mb Sound card; 32 Mb Video; 256 Mb RAM; Word 2000 (Version 9.0.3821 SR-1)

 

[Davey7549]

Gary
There are two main Speech Recognition programs on the market today. Dragon Naturally speaking and IBM Via Voice. I attached reviews by two websites. My personal experience is with IBM Via Voice and I expect Dragon will be about the same.
My thoughts; the software has finally broken the barrier of ability to obtain a high level of accuracy. First versions were wrought with problems. If you plan on using any speech recognition software you will have to spend a great deal of time teaching it your speech patterns. During initial set you have to read many lines/statements and so on to set up a base to work with. Once that is complete the fun starts. After you have input a document you will have go to each and every mistake and manually correct it to teach the software the nuisances of your speech. This may take several tries for many words since they can be accentuated many different ways.
Also along the way of teaching the software periodically backup the voice file on some removable media to protect your work.
After you have gone through it you certainly would not want to do it again!
Here are the reviews I mentioned.
<a href=http://www.cnet.com/software/0-3227838-8-2938624-1.html>Review 1</a>
<a href=http://www.epinions.com/cmsw-Software-All-Productivity_application_Category-Voice_Recognition_Subcategory/_redir_att__~1>Review 2</a>
Hope that gets you started.
Dave

 

[hewee]

Having a good mic will help also. Get one that cuts out all the background sounds too.