Faced with writing a 200-page thesis in the next year, I'm toying with the idea of getting myself a voice recognition software package. Dragon seems to be the industry leader. Here's a demo.
The software seems to work, is getting good reviews on Amazon, and is not terribly expensive. On the other hand, it seems like it might be hard to find a place to talk loudly to oneself and a computer for long periods of time. It also seems likely that training the software and editing its mistakes could be pretty time consuming. Also, Dragon seems built with MS Office in mind. Given that I lean open source (and don't even have Office on my laptop), would it work for me?
Bottom line: would this be more like the digital stylus I got a few months ago (and use all the time)? Or the extra external hard drives I got a year before that (and have only booted up to make sure they work)?
So I'm on the fence. I really wish Dragon had a trial version. Anybody have anything to add here?
PS: Yes, I do know that one episode of The Office. (Dwight: "Cancel card. Can-suhl car-Duh.")
PPS: How long do you think until a viable open-source option opens up? Probably at least a couple years, unless someone like Google decides to launch a free version. They seem to be making moves in that direct (see here for an easy application, and here for a broader one).
1 comment:
It's not dictation software, but my Mac's voice commands go haywire whenever Elliott is jabbering as I try to talk to it. I've basically never been able to use it because of that.
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