Via voice speech to text software
Via voice 10 was a program I had bought , installed it ,and found the recognition was terrible , even after 2 learning passages were done , and so gave up on it believing computer cant really be used to dictate to documents accurately.
A year later I tried it again ,after seeing a you tube video on someone using dragon pad from naturally speaking, and decided to give it (Via Voice) another ago before purchasing Naturally Speaking , as the video author was also making a lot of mistakes with the software, from Naturally speaking, accuracy.
Plus Naturally speaking was like $100!
Starting up the software I decided to go through all of the general training recognition passages to train the system , rather than just the 2 I had originally done. And lo and behold , the software actually recognised my voice and accurately wrote what I said to an accuracy of 1 error in 10 words , which I thought acceptable.
It does get better as you use it ,but you do have to keep adding words to train it for different words. Things like a and I get mixed up and you need to add them separately in the “train” option.
It does run very low resources and runs quite happily on my 700mhz tranmetta crusoe 385ram sony picture book , which has a long battery life and ultra portable for dictating anywhere.
Via voice is available quite cheaply for as little as $25 or £15 sterling , I got mine from Serif ( the web design software people)
It is now owned by Nuance (naturally speaking designers) who bought it from IBM. But is now a discontinued product and not supported.
Problems.
The long bar across the top of the screen messed up my icons , so change that to floating bar in options.Do not ever run it with firefox windows open it crashes and you have to reinstall . Other than that pretty good , so good I had to buy Dragon Naturally speaking 8.
Recap….
- accuracy was quite good after reading the prescribed 5 (only) passages to 1 error in 10
- gets better as you use it
- used low resources , great for battery power and low speed notebooks
- really cheap
