Tommy Collison

When I was in America, back in August, they recommended that I get some voice recognition software. I actually got around to buying the software last week but decided not to touch it until I’d finished my exams, or else I wouldn’t have got any study done. However, now that my exams are over (yahoo!) I got it out and set it up.

I think that these voice recognition softwares are infamous for many things, first and foremost: their difficulty to set up. Indeed, when I hopped onto MSN and told one of my friends I got this software his reaction was “oh good luck with setting that up!”

Now that I can speak experience, having done this 15 minutes ago, the installation process was pretty painless for a something for so much can go wrong. Because all voices are different, having a computer that can understand what you’re saying is a pretty impressive feat (an especially cool feature of this is that it knew the difference between “feet” and “feat” by the words around it. Of course the novelty will dissipate when I want to talk about someone’s impressive feet!).

It works with any application including MSN, Chrome, iTunes or pretty much any app that I have tried. This is handy, although the iTunes support is kind of unnecessary because I can’t exactly listen to music while I’m dictating. I’m just being picky now.

Even looking up the word count of this post and now (236) I can totally feel that this is worth it. While it may be quicker in MSN conversations to type manually, big boxes of text like this are much better handled when I use the dictation.

I suppose I can’t do a review of the speech recognition software without talking about how accurate it is. The answer is that it is too early to tell. I’ve been using it for about an hour now and of course I’ve had a lot of mistakes but I think that could be down to the fact that I use a lot of colloquialisms (got that first time!), such as LOL (which came up as Lyle, Law all or lull the first time that I try to say it) or when I tried to use emoticons such as :) or :P which would come out like this: P

Overall, I’m very happy with the software and I’m doing big batches of writing such is now. And like any good software, it’s learning very quickly: many of the mistakes made when I first started using it are not being made now. Of course there is still a lot of room for improvement and a lot of practice to be done.

I’ll keep you updated!

P.S. Interested to see how my manual typing speed compared to my speech speed, I took one of those online typing speed tests. Manually typing, I can manage about 50 words, while speaking I managed 126. Also, if anyone is interested, the software I have is MacSpeech Dictate, which I bought from CompuB.