Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - Tue, 11 Jan 2005

Yet another bit of software research. This time I’m looking at Voice Recognition software. Since I will soon be having to put my help files / user manual together for Behold, it will be quicker to dictate at 150 words per minute than to type at 40 words per minute, and fewer thoughts will get lost as I won’t have to wait as much for my typing to catch up to my thinking.

I was surprised to find how little there is out there. Basically the two big competitors used to be Dragon Naturally Speaking and IBM Via Voice. But both are now distributed by ScanSoft. So much for competition. There are a couple of minor players: TalkItTypeIt and Voice Studio.

Five years ago, the technology just wasn’t there for voice recognition. But I think its time has finally come. My number one criteria is for level of accuracy, but I can’t find very many accuracy comparisons out there. A 97% accurate program would have three times the number of mistakes of a 99% accurate program. Mistakes means more time spent correcting.

Other important features to me would include: (1) enters text into all applications (Dragon and Via Voice only do in their very expensive versions), (2) enters punctuation smartly (Dragon), (3) enters numbers, dates and dollar amounts smartly (Via Voice), (4) low system requirements and good performance.

It seems none of them are perfect for me. There do not seem to be good unbiased comparisons of these packages on the web. I’ll have to mull them over and see which one I decide on.

If anyone has recommendations for me on this, please press my Comments button and make them in my Behold Forum. Thanks.