I had need recently to utilize Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software. Speech recognition software has come a long way and now appears to be a viable tool. I was pleasantly surprised with the degree of accuracy available using this tool,
I have used it to create several emails, documents, and blog entries and have been able to do this relatively efficiently. The product trained quickly using my voice and analyzing documents and emails to understand the form of my writing and my vocabulary.
It was pretty accurate to begin with and gets better as I use it, This does not mean that I don’t occasionally get sloppy and not enunciate, which will produce the occasional odd entry. These can be easily cleared with a quick “scratch that” command which deletes the last string that you entered.
You have excellent control within certain environments such as word processing and browsing/searching the web. Unknown programs work with a hybrid of keyboard, mouse and voice and using the scripting function you can create new commands. We are not at the point of going strictly to voice with our systems but we can realize some definite gains from the use of speech software in controlling them, especially in the area of capturing large quantities of text.
One failing of the speech recognition software is that if you are using it in a very noisy environment, especially one where there is a significant amount of speech in the background, It will occasionally pick up stray sounds and place stray text in your document. This is definitely a product of the type of microphone that you are using. The more directional your mic, the less interference you get from extraneous sounds.
Sin is ce I am going to be giving this product a workout over the next few weeks I will keep you up-to-date on the progress that it makes in staying with my needs both in control and in document creation. It will be interesting to see how much I grow to use it over more standard input devices and how much it really can take over for the keyboard and mouse.