Many people own a copy of Windows Vista or Windows 7, but many people don’t know that it comes with a hands free dictate from speech to text software built in. To activate it just go to your control panel and then go through the options under the Speech Recognition button. After about an hour of setting up the software going through the tutorials and then training the software I was eager to see what this free piece of software could deliver. I told the software to ‘Start listening’ and then I ordered it to ‘Open wordpad’ and then I started dictating. Below is the result I got:
I am trying to get used to the Microsoft dictation software that comes free with windows vista. Even though I have taken the training on three separate occasions, I am having difficulty with dictating this document. I had to continuously correct myself on a continual basis because the dictation software keeps getting me muddled up. I think the main problem is that when we dictate our documents we speak very differently to how we would speak normally. We are supposed to speak in a newscaster fashion and this may not come naturally to most people even a trained presenter like myself. I have found many instances where I’ve had to correct words of context in a sentence such as the word to and two. I started this document at 11.10 AM and it is now 11.30 AM and I am finding that I’m getting used to this newscaster fashion of speaking although it is not as fluent as a program you have to pay for such as Dragon naturallyspeaking. I do like the fact that you don’t have to pay for the program if you already have windows vista although I’m starting to feel like you get what you pay for. It is now 11.35 AM to give you an idea of my progress. I have found it increasingly annoying that the computer will go and select something that I have already dictated as it gets confused with my commands with my dictation. I have to admit that the program is learning quite quickly the things that I’m saying at a relatively quick pace. Since taking the tutorial and three advanced voice recognition stages, I have launched wordpad and started typing this article without once lifting my finger to move the mouse or keyboard. There aren’t too many words in this article so far yet it is already 11.45 AM and I certainly don’t have 99.97% accuracy rate, for the amount of words that have been written I would say it’s closer to a 30 per cent accuracy rate but it is definitely going up. Read More »Microsoft Vista Speech Recognition Review