Re: XyWrite and voice recognition

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, James D. Besser wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
>

> Very useful post. Your use of VR sounds like mine, but I also wanted
> to be able to dictate into the handheld recorder out of the office,
> since I dictate some of my weekly stories anyway. I was defeated by a
> combination of problems, I think:
>
> 1. Not a top-quality sound card in the computer.
> 2. background noise. Writing a story while walking the dog works
> fine when I transcribe, but ambient noise defeats the VR software.
> 3. Memory. I upgraded my Pentium 233 to 64 MB ram, but even
> that's not enough for Dragon, I believe. Transcription of short
> segments was very slow; article-length files took forever.
> 4. My voice. Listening carefully to the recordings I was
> transcribing, I could hear that it's sort of fuzzy. Not the
> best articulation, and a timber that I imagine confuses the
> software.
>

You might post your question to the Notabene list
(NOTABENE@xxxxxxxx). Several members there have worked a lot
with Dragon Dictate versions (and others) to cope with various physical
afflictions (severe RSI and worse), and have reported quite good
success. It's a topic that comes up from time to time, and seems not to
raise the levels of dissatisfaction felt here--perhaps the happier users
had no choice and put in enough training time to get results they were
content with.

It seems somewhat like training OCR software to recognize scanned
imperfect print copy, or handwriting recognition software to handle
anything but perfect block letters: the technology continues to improve,
and early adoptors have to have high motivation to endure.

	Dorothy


*****
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx	
*****
	"He also surfs who only sits and waits."