For the past few months I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software. I am impressed to say the least!
As Dragon NaturallySpeaking is quite a demanding program to run I had to replace my faithful six year old computer with a snazzy new model. To do this I simply went to PC World, picked up a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard (£79.99), and said to an assistant "I need a PC to run this". £600 later I had what I needed!
In the past year or so I have really noticed that my typing has slowed down; e-mails to friends have become shorter and shorter, I have not bothered so much with MSN Messenger because of not wanting to be faced with the frustration of not being able to type exactly what I want to say in the way I want to say it, and in general I have been left with the feeling that everything is taking 10 times more effort and 10 times more time than it should do.
I was a little unsure of what to expect from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, taking into account my distinct ataxic accent. On the whole, although my speech is slurry and ill-toned, I do not have huge difficulties being understood. However years ago, when my speech first started to be affected, I learned to slow my speech and to take care to pronounce each word. It turned out that these are good techniques to use when using speech recognition software too. Moreover, I know of many people who have ataxia and who have speech which is way more affected than mine, who still have good results from software like this. So I decided to give it a whirl...
Setting the software up was very straightforward -- I didn't even have to look at the manual. Just plug the included microphone in (which is colour coded for easiness), install the software and go. Once the software is loaded you can start to train it up, and by that I mean train it to recognize your voice, by reading aloud set text. However I am not very good at reading aloud and therefore went on straight into dictating into Microsoft Word/Outlook/MSN Messenger etc.
To start off with, I would say it was about 70% accurate. I had to go back to correct a lot of words but this is easy to do and next time you say the word it will know what you mean -- the software is really clever in that it is learning all the time. I would say that two months on this software is now about 85% accurate, but this is improving all the time.
Two of the best things I can do with Dragon NaturallySpeaking:
- E-mail is now a breeze. I say "reply" to reply to an e-mail, dictate the content of the e-mail and then say "send" to send the e-mail. I then say "delete" to delete the e-mail from my inbox.
- I record college lectures on to a dictation machine to play back at home so I can take notes at my own pace. I have programmed a button on my keyboard to play/pause recordings. So now I say "go to sleep" to put NaturallySpeaking into sleep mode, hit the button to play the recording until I want to take some notes, hit the button again to pause the recording, say "wake-up" to wake up NaturallySpeaking and then start dictating notes into Microsoft Word.
All in all, everything takes about a 10th of the time with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Every day I learn something new about the software that makes me say "wow" out loud. Like today I learned that to launch Internet Explorer (or Microsoft Word or Outlook Express) I just have to say the words "launch Internet Explorer/Microsoft Word/Outlook Express". Or in Microsoft Word adding bullet points to a paragraph of text is just a case of selecting the text and saying " bullet this". And saying “undo that" does the same thing as choosing Undo from the Edit menu.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is fast becoming one of those things I don't know how I ever lived without (like my new all-in-one printer, but that's another story...).
Tip: Dragon recommends that you speak an entire sentence at a time. I recommend that someone with ataxia speaks two or three words at a time for the best results. It is also easier to trace and correct mistakes this way.