At 10/5/98 03:36 PM , Rob wrote:
>My Step mother was inquiring in a voice recognition software program called
>Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred Version that was recently advertised on
>Juno. Any input or experiences with the program or any other voice
>recognition programs would be greatly appreciated. Are they worth the money?
>Are they very difficult to run/setup? Are they just one person specific or
>can several people use the same program?
>

As Jack Petrilli alluded to, you have to be patient and not expect 100% out
of the box. A 'watch-out-for" is to have a fairly good microphone. I get
very low accuracy with the $2.95 microphone that came with my sound card,
but the $19 microphone gives about 90% accuracy. Don't try to rush or
bypass the training.

The variables that I have found that affect the accuracy are background
noise, keeping the same volume of voice, keeping the microphone the same
distance from and orientation to your mouth, and keeping the same
microphone.  I also use IBM ViaVoice but not the Executive edition. You can
set up different users but each will have to do the training of the system
to get consistent results. The setup is somewhat tedious in that the
microphone sensitivity settings are critical to the success of the program.

Also do some reviews of the different voice-to-text software packages.  I
think that one of the magazines did a comprehensive review about 5-6 months
ago. They each use slightly different algorithms to convert to text and
some have better accuracy than others.

Doug Simmons
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Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it.
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