Hi Paul:
WinWord speech recognition is available only in US English and works only
with American accents.
The only one I know of that works on the Mac is IBM's Via Voice.
Check the specs here carefully (VERY carefully...)
http://www.scansoft.com/viavoice/osx/
Note: It DOES NOT support Tiger OS 10.4, and it WILL NOT run properly on
the G5
Check carefully that the language you speak (not the one you wish to write,
the one you speak...) is available. Recognition accuracy is dismal if it is
not optimised for your accent.
I also suspect that the memory requirement they quote (256 MB) is "in
addition" to what everything else uses
For example, Word 2004 tends to
drag in less than 512 MB of memory under OS 10.3. ViaVoice needs to be
active (and working hard!) at the same time, so I would specify a gig of
memory in the system to avoid disappointment, if I were you.
It's worth noting that Voice Recognition is one of the hardest tasks a
computer can be set: it really finds out whether your system can perform.
If you stint on the hardware, it will never go well.
Finally, get the upscale version with the noise-cancelling headset.
Recognition accuracy improves dramatically if you have a clean signal going
in.
By the way: the "accuracy" that voice recognition software houses brag about
sounds fantastic on paper until you figure out that "96 per cent accuracy"
means that you get to make a correction in EACH sentence of dictation
A
Word processor with a very powerful grammar checker (such as Word 2004...)
is a some advantage: unfortunately, the mistaykes a dictation program makes
tend always to be "correctly spelled"
In other words, it mis-recognises
a whole "word", not some "letters", so there are often no spelling errors to
alert you to a problem.
And be careful to distinguish between "continuous speech" recognisers such
as ViaVoice, and "discreet word" recognisers. The continuous speech ones
can recognise natural human speech: the others, you have to pause slightly
between each word :-( OK for entering keyboard commands ("Next paragraph")
but useless for dictation.
Enjoy!
Is speech recognition built into word as in the office version for
windows? If not what is a good brand for speech recognition software
for a Mac?
-Paul
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Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
