<crashing, banging, and clattering as I fall out of dormancy>

I've recently decided that I need to invest in some sort of system to use for speech recognition/dictation. I wind up commuting two hours every day and would really like to be able to put that time towards writing or such [particularly given Nation Novel Writing Month starting soon] instead of feeling like it's just a waste of my day.

I've done some reading so far but haven't really come down on a hard and fast solution.

Ideally, I would like to find something that runs on Linux so I can drag my personal laptop along and use that, but what I've dug up so far seems to indicate that such solutions don't actually exist for Linux yet, which makes me a very sad panda. Cough,

I already have a Bluetooth headset and have a pcmcia adapter card on order.

If worse comes to worst, I /could/ use my work Thinkpad but I'd rather not clutter that much cos of audits and stuff.

Alternately, if anyone is aware of a PDA that has dictation/speech-recognition functionality that could work decently as well.

So any recommendations for hardware or software would be much appreciated, as this is pretty foreign territory to me so far. Thanks for any insights!

vista has voice recognition

Vistas voice recognition is the only one I've used so far and it's pretty decent. I imagine you'd have to go back through and make edits to the text later to ensure that what you said is what you heard. You can do that with vistas recognition system, but that would require you to be looking at the screen to see where it screwed up and that doesnt sound too safe for driving.

Vista is the best that's out there right now and it's free (if you have the OS).

Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all

Vista speech recognition isn't very good imo. If I have a fan blowing on me (and my mic) it falls flat on it's face... you'd think they could filter that out. And when I don't, it only correctly recognizes what I say correctly some of the time. And that doesn't count the times it says "What was that?", only the times it gets it wrong. Also it likes popping up a "What did you say?" dialog, but either the item I said isn't in the list, or when I select the command I said, it TYPES it instead.

Keyboard and mouse is far faster and more accurate.

you could just use a tape recorder or digital voice recorder and dictate it yourself.

Considering how much you would have to proofread and fix, this would probably be a better choice.

When I broke my hand, I made extensive use of Vista's voice recognition software. It takes a little while to train it, but it ended up working really well.

As for free software, I don't know of any, but I'll keep my eyes open.

I doubt there's anything free. Voice recognition is pretty complicated to develop, I imagine.

I’m writing this post using speech recognition to give you an idea of how accurate it is. As you can see so far it’s completely accurate. One slight problem is that it doesn’t interpret long pauses in a sentence breaks. So when you’re speaking it feels like you’re reading a telegram or something. Anyone is in conclusion I guess the standard voice recognition that comes with Microsoft office isn’t all that bad. I mean it’s pretty workable for taking notes or whatever, and sure you feel kind of weird talk in your computer but I mean they do it on star trek so how bad can it be. Computer go to red alert. LOL. Captain jean Luc Picard of the USS enterprise. Okay that’s actually surprising, I didn’t expect it to get that last bit.

Haha, that was awesome. Was that Vista or Office XP?

Office 2003 on XP.

I used a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking to write history papers in High School. Sure it stumbled a lot (Huguenots), but that also might have been my pronunciation. Voice Recognition is defiantly Viable Technology, and has been for some time, but it takes allot of training, both for the computer, and for yourself before it really works well.

Slightly off topic but I remember back when I tried the voice commander 2.0 demo, I programmed the game to make my player in Day of Defeat shout "sniper!" whenever I said sniper in the mic. However, the software was pretty glitchy and would sometimes do the sniper command whenever I breathe into the mic. Just imagine all my teammates getting freaked out whenever I breathe, lol.

Heh I also tried something similar a while back on my old Pentium 3; it was just designed for opening applications and doing basic things like accessing drop-down menus, but it wasn't very good at actually recognizing what you were saying. I dropped the microphone once and it opened 15 instances of Word.

(15 may be a slight exaggeration)

Possibly, but it's not an easy task. If the fan was blowing fast enough (as I suspect it was) the signal was saturated with the sound of it, making the SNR too low for filtering to be of any use.

What I'm getting at is that it's your fault.

Vista's speech recognition is far better than anything free.

Well the issue with transcribing it myself after recording is then I spend the same amount of time listening and typing it [probably more as I don't type as fast as I hear]; so I don't really gain any time that way.

Vista voice recognition would be great if I had a laptop or PDA that ran Vista.. which I don't [unless I buy that Alienware lappy I've been eying >.>]

I'd even buy a specialized PDA just for dictation if such a thing existed..

Though if all else fails, I can feed the recorded audio through an SRS and get it transcribed while I sleep or sommat..

Or hire a guy in India >.>

Office 2007 also has the same voice recognition inside Word.

And if you're a student you can get Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 right now.

i got Office Enterprise 2007 for $20

Really? I don't see it anywhere.

I got Office 2007 Professional for free.

My sister gets Office 2007 Ultimate, Vista 2007 Ultimate and other stuff like Photoshop CS3 Extended all for free through her school. D:

Huh! You're right, they took it out! That's whack. I guess only 2003 has it.

long listing using one computer for technicians and and then we can actually affect the anyone who needs training and no more training has his eyes and event and who. it probably will go off and then brush and given the.

>.> <.<

that is my attempt at dictation.