Vista Vs. Dragon for Speech Recognition

[Ripper]

Yet another test with Dragon Naturally Speaking and a Microsoft VX-6000 webcam open air microphone.

http://www.ncrypt.net/touchscreen/cqc/do...take2.html

The camera I'll admit is only $99 but I use it sitting back comfortably in my office chair and video conference with family and they can hear me well..they use the same thing on their laptops and I can hear them well when they speak.

The last video was done with a logitech headset with the mic maybe 1" from my mouth and even then you can see the amount of errors I had with Dragon understanding my voice..unless you plan to walk around your home wearing a headset I can't see this working reliably..I'd hate to say "lights off" at 3 a.m and it be interpreted as "Alarm instant on" and wake the family :-)

As for the background noise you hear...in my office I have a water cooled PC with a single fan running at 50% and it can barely be heard when I am sitting in here..the mics amplify everything alot and make that tiny fan sound like a hurricane...it sounds nothing like the recording at all when I'm sitting in front of my monitor!

[IVB]

Thanks for the demo, esp that open-air one. You are right, it's hard to know whether this will work or not; also as you were going in the demo, I realized that a macro really is what I need, so I only issue one voice statement and it can take care of multiple things. You have immediate feedback in that demo on mistake as you're at the PC, but I won't be at the PC so I need to keep this as simple as possible.

I guess I will look into that macro express (heck, it's only $10 and has a trial), then see what I can do to trigger the macro's. Those other VR programs seem very hack-ish though; hate to have a situation where "i get what I pay for", esp the one that is freeware and seems to be available on most of the P2P sites. I'd be concerned about viruses there.

I'm also not going to be using a headset, rather a crown table mic. I could do momentary on so it's not constantly listening, but i'll still suffer from the same issues you were in that 2nd demo.

Alas, the pain of being on the bleeding edge...

[Ripper]

You got nothing to lose by using trial software for 30 days..if your itchy wallet finger went and bought Dragon you might lose $200 and all you get in return is a software that you can occasionly have fun with.

Even though I own it I rarely use it because of the reliability, if I could just blab away and not have to pause or speak unnaturaly I'd probably use it everyday..perhaps in a few years it will be even better but it sure has come a long way from when you had to train it for hours on end to recognize your voice, nowadays it works almost right after installation.

As for those programs I recommended...just an example, search google for "control windows with voice" and you'll find many programs to experiment with.

I had used Macro Express for many months until switching to Automate6 http://www.networkautomation.com/automate/automate6/ and have to say for the money macro express worked amazing, I needed Automate 6 for specific things for work that macro express couldn't do.

[IVB]

Quick question: As noted in my "progress" thread, i just played around with VRCommander. One thing that's nice is the ability to tie a spoken phrase to a keystroke.

Does Dragon have that ability?

FYI - looks like there's a $50 rebate at buy.com for preferred, plus I just got a 7% off coupon, so now i'm resisting a $110 shipped Dragon Preferred :-)

[Ripper]

Does Dragon have that ability?

I believe only the expensive $900-950 version has that ability, I do not notice it in my preferred version and thats why I suggested a cheapo software for now so you could have that ability and play with it.

[rhamer]

Clipsal actually sell a full commercial product based on Dragon, called Homespeak.

It's a voice activated interface into the C-Bus lighting system that lets you control C-Bus stuff.

I've never heard of anybody actually using it, but the've had it for sale for a few years now.

Cheers

Rohan