Speech Recognition

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Allen Dick
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Speech Recognition

Unread post by Allen Dick »

Doe anyone here use speech recognition?

SR is built into Windows and I played with it at one point, but lost interest in it as it seemed to be clumsy. Before that, I bought Dragon Naturally Speaking years and years ago, but found inaccurate at the time..

I use SR on my phone all the time for email and texts, however, and am looking at the Windows version again now.
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Charlie
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Re: Speech Recognition

Unread post by Charlie »

I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12.5 for a while now. I did buy two licenses for the two computers that I use the most because in my opinion 12.5 was actually worth the money unlike all previous versions. The speech recognition in windows 7 is absolutely horrible in comparison. I believe you can download a 30 day trial and tested out. It should run beautifully on your notebook with a high-quality microphone. The microphone supplied with the software in my opinion is just pure crap and I use Logitech USB headset which I believe is currently running around $80. It does take quite a while to get it properly trained and to get used to working with it. I find it works best in Microsoft Word, even better than their little editor window that is built-in.

It does not work well if you have 100 things open on your computer or are into the swap file because of lack of RAM.

If you do choose to buy it look around a lot I believe I got mine for just about half price.

This entire reply was dictated in Microsoft Word and then cut and pasted into the reply editor. I do not believe that I have touched the keyboard once in this dictation, so I can recommend Dragon NaturallySpeaking if you have a need for dictation software.

Charlie
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Re: Speech Recognition

Unread post by Allen Dick »

Thanks, Charlie. I may give it a shot.

My experience with Google voice recognition has convinced me that I need to improve my elocution if I expect not to have a lot of correction to do. Have you noticed if using it has improved your speech clarity generally?

Ham radio is another activity that demands clear speech, but does not give such immediate and obvious feedback as dictating to SR software :)
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Charlie
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Re: Speech Recognition

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>Have you noticed if using it has improved your speech clarity generally?
Not really, but it has made me aware if you’ll pardon the English, how piss poor and my speech patterns are. Annunciation is atrocious for me, what I think I’m saying is not what the computer is hearing. I’m sure you find this with Google voice on your android phone. I have an S3 and absolutely love the voice dictation, why anyone would fool around taping at a small screen when they can talk is beyond me. It also makes me wonder what medical conditions will come about because you typing on glass, I’m sure the shock values to the tips of the fingers and thumbs cannot be good over a long period of time.

The reason I went to voice dictation originally was for the long-winded wordy reports that the corporations of the world demand without having a repeat of carpal tunnel syndrome. Personally I feel like a dork when I have both wrists in splints. I did read somewhere that the average person talks at around 200 words a minute while a good typist will bang out 75-80 words a minute. I probably average 60 to 70 words a minute with corrections in a long document but I am not risking carpal tunnel syndrome. I know this sounds obscenely low, but to me it’s a huge improvement in productivity. One of the huge benefits is to have Dragon NaturallySpeaking read the document back to you; this does help me find poor speech patterns grammatical errors etc. again proving how poor my English actually is.

One of things that I have noticed is that I tend to think about what I’m going to say more now, before opening my mouth. If I can paraphrase our former Premier Ralph Klein: I load my brains before shooting my mouth off. :lol:

One of the other things I’ve noticed is that I tend to be more verbose and all over the map when using dictation software; as compared to typing. When I’m at the keyboard I tend to be very short, direct and to the point. Which brings to mind a point that a colleague made some years ago “just because you can hold up your end of the conversation does not mean you are a good writer”.

All in all I would say it’s a plus but it is interesting to have a computer pointing out in a roundabout way flaws that you have when everyone else just takes poor speech for granted and understands what you meant.

I hope this helps you.
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Re: Speech Recognition

Unread post by Allen Dick »

I hope this helps you.
Yes.
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Charlie
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Re: Speech Recognition

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It has been a year all most to the day for this thread. With all the testing that I been doing on Linux; Speech Recognition and Speech Dictation are borderline black art. However if you use Chrome and you go to the App Store and search for " dictation" there are a couple of plugins that you can use. I chose to test "Speech Notes" https://speechnotes.co/ and have found it to be super simple to use and quite effective. I would guess 98% accuracy. They give you a window with a microphone that you dictate your document into and then you have to cut and paste it into its final form. It is nowhere near as powerful as Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I think most people would find it an acceptable alternative. It should work on any operating system that will run Chrome and obviously you're going to want a faster system. I suspect the Google speech engine is under the hood.

I could not find anything like this for Firefox. Most of the other voice dictation things that I tried on the web or downloaded have not been worth the time.
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Charlie
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Re: Speech Recognition

Unread post by Charlie »

While my initial viewpoint of Speech Notes was quite positive, Over the last day I found that it would lock my system up to the point where I would need to power down and reboot. Keep in mind this was on a Linux Mint 17.3 system with Chrome so this may be a good tool on a Windows system or a Mac system but certainly not on Linux Mint.

As I stated there is a half a dozen of these types of tools in the Chrome App Store and I'm systematically working through them until I find one that I like the best. VoiceNote 2 seems to be much more robust in the sense that it hasn't crashed my system yet and it has more options language etc. What I do like about it is that it does pop up a separate window for dictating into that you can move from screen to screen if you have two screens and is not a web page. This means I can look at something and dictate without bouncing back and forth between windows.

So far the biggest problem I see with it is they don't know that Canada spells "color" and "labor" with the letter U so clearly it's using US dictionaries.

I did find a couple of references That all of these apps in the chrome store are using the Google speech engine under the hood.
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Re: Speech Recognition

Unread post by Allen Dick »

So far the biggest problem I see with it is they don't know that Canada spells "color" and "labor" with the letter U so clearly it's using US dictionaries.
Apparently the setting is under Chrome settings, and Canadian English can be added. That is from a review on the app page. I have yet to get around to trying it.
Allen Dick, RR#1 Swalwell, Alberta, Canada T0M 1Y0
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