voice recogition software...any users?

I think voice recognition software is a great idea but in practice we found it lacking. Haven't tried it in two years now but my son attends a 'state of the art' school in computer science and no one there is using voice recognition. Makes me think it still has 'bugs' in it.

But some parents have posted to this board speaking positively of it. We tried one of the Dragon Naturally Speaking products ourselves and could not get it to read my son's voice with accuracy.

If you do a google search, you'll likely find some sites that review the latest voice recognition software whatever it might be.

Good luck.

Oh yeah, I should comment that voice recognition is difficult for teens because the voice is changing, particularly boys. And that the models for the voice recognition engine are adult. I think Dragon or IBM experimented with a teen version but I think it was about the most returned piece of software I have ever seen. (Used to go to a store that carried returned software.) Also takes a high frustration tolerance. You are more inaccurate as you start using and then your accuracy should go up but you have to got thru that, and a lot of kids can't take it. Make that a lot of people. However, there are some people who need it badly enoguh that they can put up with all this. The PC products are more developed than the Mac ones, having been around longer, but they still are not real good with teen voices.

--des

Why I recommend you try word prediction. It solves a couple problems that very poor typists and people with dyslexia might have. Fatigue from typing and the inability to spell words. Cowriter 4000 has a feature that takes phonetic spellings or common misspellings and converts these to the correct word. A parent or teacher could also create macros that would do this. This program was great for me. I was a terrible typists with a typing speed of about 5 words a minute. I also was very frustrated as I made so many errors. A good word prediction software can type into any software just about (I think database is the exception.). And this literally was the case-- online, different word processors, etc. So there is a nice flexibiltity there. I have since gotten to be a better typist (long story, but it was NOT from typing software-- mighta taught me to type but I got SO frustrated with them).

Anyway, as I said they are SLOW, but the lower fatigue and very high accuracy makes up for this. Something you should check out, imo.

--des

and one more thing...
an awful lot of people find that, well, to put it bluntly, we don't really talk the way we should write. Lots of students benefit more than they realized from the whole kinesthetic aspect of writing or typing (I know I do, though I'm not anything like dyslexic and can already type fast). Word prediction and hearing what they write help a lot (TextHelp! does both nicely)

Sue J, webmastress www.resourceroom.net

My 17 year old is having success with Dragon too. We did have a Dragon trainer come to the house to teach him, but in 2 one hour sessions he felt more comfortable than I had been able to do on my own. It still takes a while to correct errors, but I think he will just get better and better at using the program and it helps him to be so much more independent.

My 15 year old is having great success with the newest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking. He trained it, did the 30 minute tutorial, practiced a bit on AOL IM and then wrote a really good history paper. It was the first time ever that one of his papers sounded like it was even close to the grade level of his thinking. We did find that we had to turn off the voice recognition software that comes with Windows XP. It was conflicting, and the accuracy was horrendous until we turned off the Windows program.