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Well , as you read previously, I had bought the via voice software , and gave up and then tried again and found it actually quite good. I wanted better and there is a lot of hype about Nat speaking so I bought Naturally speaking 8 standard.

I found the standard version was lacking in the voice recording option to play back mistakes or miswriting, and I found the microphone that it comes with absolutely useless , and even after the training was completely finished , the writing appeared to be much worse . A substantial improvement was gained with using the cheap microphone that came with via voice, but it seems that NS8 is quite fussy about the mic. The more I used it the better it got , but it was taking too long and I eventually went back to Via Voice as it had taken much less time to get great results.

As naturally speaking 8 uses the same algorithms as the preferred version , a quick search online netted an amount of information that was equal to Version 9 is 15% better than Version 8 and Version 10 is 30% better than version 9. So not wanting to quite give up on the idea of getting a great voice recognition software , that would improve my productivity immensely, I couldn’t just dismiss dragon pad, I mean what if I was giving up on the best dictation software ever!

So I bought the Naturally Speaking Version 10 preferred, which was not cheap at $80 from Amazon (see the right) , and used it to upgrade my version 8 , which by the way they said you should not do, you should start from scratch, but hell I did it any way. After the set up , I ran to test and to my surprise the software did work quite well. It is obvious that the software has a much better recognition algorithm than before and produced results much the same as via voice ( though that was still 1/6 of the price).

I bought a headset microphone fron hebaay for $2 just to see what would happen , and I found this cheap microphone was much better than the supplied Emkay product that came with.

After more research , and further tweaking I finally bought the N95 Andrea headset in dual cup. This gave me a great recognition, up to 1 word in 30 incorrect, which is well over 95%.

So in conclusion , Via voice 10 is better than Naturally speaking 8 (all versions) and Nat speaking 10 preferred is better than Via voice 10 , by far,

but

• costs more,
• is more fussy about the headset, and
• takes longer to tweak ,
• is a real resource hog and not for the slower pc

however it does

• let you dictate at tremendous speeds
• has superb accuracy

so Via voice is great if you have little money for the software and for the headset ,and even if you have a slow computer,

But Naturally speaking 10 preferred is the best if you want the best productivity.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 11:12 am and is filed under Speech to text. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.