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Re: [Phys-l] Voice recognition

At school, we have several students use Dragon. The latest
version is usually quite expensive, but you can often find
the previous version for much less money at Amazon or
another discounter.

The program has to be trained to your voice and you have to
be trained to its quirks. The longer you use it the better
both of you will get. You may not be splinted up for long
enough to make it worth your while. Many of our students
really like it and use it regularly. A couple of faculty
members use it. It works especially well if you have
certain boiler plate items.

Finally, there are one handed keyboards. One of our
students has little use of one side of the student's body.
That student uses a chording keyboard very successfully.
<http://www.infogrip.com/product_view.asp?RecordNumber=12>

Marc "Zeke" Kossover

--- John Denker <jsd@av8n.com> wrote:

On 11/26/2007 12:30 PM, John SOHL wrote:

managed to smash my left thumb with a
large pipe. It will be in a splint for weeks.

Bummer!

I was thinking of trying Dragon.

1) There's a useful review at
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,1996759,00.asp

2) Don't skimp on the microphone. A MSO
(microphone-shaped
object) from Rat Shack is not an adequate substitute
for
a real microphone.

You want a microphone you can wear on your head.
Position
it at the corner of your mouth, not right in front (to
avoid what we call "nose noise").

3) The software will eat up a lot of memory and a lot of
CPU
cycles.

4) Don't expect too much from speech recognition. Splint
or
no splint, you might well find it easier to type than
to
dictate. It might be worthwhile to pursue typing
options.

-- Ask the doc if there is any way to make the splint
less
bulky. There's lots of different kinds of splints in
the
world.

-- There are some "ergonomic" split keyboards that split
the left-hand keys from the right-hand keys, and mount
each batch of keys at a funny angle. This doesn't
improve
the mobility of the hurt hand, but at least it keeps it
from interfering with the other hand.

If you can touch-type with one hand and peck with the
other,
that gets you within 2x of normal typing speed, which
is
probably better than you could do with speech
recognition.

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