Speech to text

[bfrikken]

Well, I'm getting frustrated, and figured I'd turn to the most knowledgable group I know concerning.... well just about everything.

I commute an hour each way to work. That gives me two hours of what I consider very unproductive time each day. I've done books on CD, pod casts, listen to radio, and even just good old quiet.

I was talking to someone about "wishing I could get my thoughts down on paper easier." He pointed me to Word 2003 with the Speech tool. I can train it with a headset (mic) and it will take my dictation and type out what I say. Pretty cool. Now I've read that Dragon Naturally Speaking is quite awesome, but Word is already on my laptop.

So on my way to work yesterday, I turned my laptop on, and spoke into my headset on the way to work. Of course, I was careful not to keep looking over at my laptop (it was in the passenger seat). When I got to work, I was amazed at how well it worked. It made some mistakes, and a lot I even feel like I can fix by training with it more, and also training myself how to speak to it better.

Ok, so here's my long winded question. I don't want to have to tote my laptop all around. I tried a cheapo digital voice recorder ( RCA 5013) , but it was such bad playback, it was indecipherable being played back into Word.

Anyone have any experience with this? My goal is capturing Speech to text so i'm not typing. I have to spend all day coding as a developer, I figure I could work on documentation, notes, etc on my drive to and from home.

Ideas? Help....

[Wood_workur]

Sounds like a good use of time. I think it would be best to go straight into word, because the loss in quality willn't be there, and you will not have to train your comp to the computer.

[dlminehart]

Olympia makes a number of digital voice recorders. See Amazon for products, prices, reviews, etc. For less than $150 you can get one that'll do umpteen hours of recording (up to 5 folders with up to 99 files in each), excellent sound quality (you can choose where to trade quality for quantity). Built in USB connector to transfer files to computer. Easy and cheap to get a program to do batch conversions of the files to WMV or MP3. Widely used by journalists, including those where I work.

[crokett]

Unless you absolutely have to have the recorder everwhere you go, I'd do the dictation in the car and stick with the laptop. It elminates the step of having to transfer everything. With the recorder you are now dictating twice - once into the recorder then you have to play the recorder into Word.

[RmeDad]

Another solution!

Hire a CUTE assistant, put her in the passenger seat and let her type what you dictate. Also helps make the trip seem shorter or at least more pleasant!

[just4funsies]

I think I saw somewhere that some iPod (or iPod imitator) units have voice recorder capability. I wonder if the replay quality would lend itself to digital transference into Word?

As a sidenote, I tried for two weeks to "train" the speech recog. feature in Word to my voice, and still was spending more time proofreading and correcting than I would have spent typing it from scratch. Gave up, finally. Speech recog has come very far, indeed, but it's still not there, IMHO.

Of course, one of you wise guys is going to suggest that it's my Southern drawl that's mucking up the process, instead of the software...

Jeet?
Naw, joo?
Naw, yawntoo?
Awwight...

[crokett]

Hire a CUTE assistant, put her in the passenger seat and let her type what you dictate. Also helps make the trip seem shorter or at least more pleasant!

His wife might have problems with this one.

[rg32]

I’ve used different versions of Dragon, both while working in education with children who have disabilities as an adaptive learning and communications tool and when I broke my wrist in the middle of a semester while taking an online class.
I know one thing about the voice recognition software I have used, it is very sensitive to voice variations and it doesn't fool easy. So if it holds true now with what you are using you would probably need to train it using both your voice speaking direct and using a high quality recorded voice during the process.
It would be interesting to find out if it could be done to degree of satisfaction.

.

[bfrikken]

I took the RCA recorder back, and walked over to radio shack. They had a Sony ICD-B200 there on clearance. I decided to try it out.

It works much better then the RCA. Paid 50 bucks. But, it still doesn't work anywhere near as well as the headset straight into the laptop.

I used the recorder to train MS word. It worked fine, but when I played my audio file, it was too jumbled to even understand. I'm not using a headset with it, and figure that'd make a big difference. So, I'm now wondring if I should just take the Sony back and go for one that is USB and also buy a headset. Or just stick with the Head set and laptop.

[messmaker]

The brand I used ( textbridge, I think) never got better than about 90% correct.