Has anyone used any voice recognition software for writing up a PhD? Any experiences, suggestions and advice? I have reached the stageof Repetitive Strain Injury but still have to write up my PhD but typing with the left hand only wont lead me far;(((((

I'd be curious about this too - would be well-handy for transcribing ;)

IListen for for the Mac. Easily found on the PB. Not bad, not great. Needs time (15hrs) to learn your voice.

i tried ViaVoice, but even after many hours of reading stories to it (to learn my voice), it still got loads of words wrong. Can be quite amusing tho, watching what you say come out as something completely different on screen! I found it a bit like chinese whispers!

jennifr, I know what you mean- I tried voice recognition that comes with Windows XP, that was fun--could do loads of creative writing using the results of it:)) I did some research, seems that a software Dragon NAturally Speking in the best in the market...Anyone has experience with it??

I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.5, it is very easy to use and once loaded only takes about 5 minutes to train your voice. The accuracy is VERY good, there is also an accuracy centre for training any words it does not appear to recognise, very useful for me as there are a lot of sector / discipline specific acronyms in use in my work. I use it predominantly for interview transcription (listen to interview in headset and repeat into microphone) it has more than halved the time it was taking to transcribe HOWEVER....

I have a plain middle English accent and have read (via reviews on Amazon) that it does not cope so well if you have a very strong accent. I would recommend reading these reviews, when I last read them they had been posted by by researchers from a variety of disciplines. Hope this helps.

Thank you AcademicMum very much, this helps. I was worried about accents,I have red it in reviews as well...I got very strong accent. BTW, do you use the headset that comes with the software or had to buy new one, better?

Hi AcademicMum and verdy,

I was reading this thread and was interested in whether this software can recognise different voices? This would be useful for example doing focus group work.

Also are there versions in different languages? For example in German?

rick: I guess, I saw on Amazon that they have it in different languages. BUT: if you buy a personal version (much cheaper) than it allows only one user/speaker (apprently in order to hinder people from making illegal copies).

Verdy - I bought a headset from a company called Tamms direct on the internet, it was about £40 as I didn;t want to take any chances with the recognition being inaccurate, however a colleague of mine just uses the standard one and doesn't have any problems using it.

Rick - I use for interviews, it obviously only recognises my voice, but I just listen to the tape through the headset and repeat what the interviewee says back into the microphone, each time I lead it with the persons name, so I know who said what - not sure how this would work for your focus groups, depends how large a group I guess.

Hi AcademicMum and verdy,

thanks for your replies, this is interesting and indeed could save an awful lot of work and potentially resources. I am still in the process of setting up my research and these things could make life a lot easier.

Regards

Rick

I tried out Dragon NS this morning in Computer Service...Well, it works really bad when you have a strong accent:((( So dissapointing:((

Hi verdy,

what kind of an accent have you got?

Eastern European:P Something that developers of software definitely havent bothered about;)