Speech Recognition

Anyone actually use speech recognition on a regular basis and find it useful?  I use text to speech all the time for proof reading.  But I am wondering if it is worthwhile to out and get a good head set mike and take advantage of the rest of the speech software.

Bill Rushmore
Thursday, May 6, 2004

In my experience, it depends on what you are using it for.

A few of our providers use it for dictating notes.  With doctors it works okay, the vocabulary is fairly limited and most doctors have a style that they use consistently.  It does take some training to get this work well, but with the doctors, we just feed their last 3 years of dictation into dragon and let it use that as the basis for its statistical analysis.

For radiologists it works even better as their vocabulary is very limited.

For me it work lousily, but I don't need it since I don't do that many text things (other than coding), and when I do I find that I can generally type faster than I can get the dictation software to understand me.

Regardless of your use, if you are going to use speech recognition buy a good headset microphone.  It makes a big difference.

Steve Barbour
Thursday, May 6, 2004

I will second the good headset mike thing.  A few years ago I repaired a laptop for a disabled guy who uses speech recognition constantly.  He said that after a few months the headset wires wear out and he gets severely degraded speech recognition.  At that point he has to buy a new headset.  My own copy of Dragon was working pretty crappily at the time, so I took his advice and got a new headset, and lo and behold, performance jumped back up where it ought to be.

Kyralessa
Thursday, May 6, 2004

"few months the headset wires wear out"

Huh?  Are you sure it wasn't just oxidation on the connector? Not sure how wires "wear out" unless there is obvious abrasion...

sgf
Thursday, May 6, 2004

"He said that after a few months the headset wires wear out and he gets severely degraded speech recognition."

This happened to my cordless phone headsets, until I fixed them.

They wear out at the connectors because there's no "strain relief".  I.e., people yank on the cables (or the headset gets dropped, etc.), pulling on the connection point.

SIMPLE SOLUTION
I tape the cable at each end ( headset end  and the phone end). Haven't had a problem since. Works great on all 3 of my cordless phones.

IRONY: Previously, my biggest problem with my cordless phones was... the cords.

Mr. Analogy
Thursday, May 6, 2004

Sounds like how walkman headphones will start crackling and only working in one ear unless you bend the cable

Matthew Lock
Thursday, May 6, 2004

It seems to me that the workers who do the most typing tend to work in cubicals and in such an environment speech instead of typing would be highly irritating.

What we really need is thought recognition software.

name withheld out of cowardice
Friday, May 7, 2004

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