using voice recognition

[Christine Fournier]

I am thinking about purchasing a voice recognition software (Dragon Naturally
Speaking Professional, French).
Would it be possible to use VBA (I would have to learn to use it) so that my
students practice there speech ?
For example, I would build a slide with four grayscale pictures and if a
student say correctly the name of one of the picture, the picture would
become colored and animate.

Thanks for your input.

 

[Michael Dunn]

If you are going to develop speech recognition type applications, I'd suggest
you look into getting Windows Vista, as it includes Speech Recognition and
you can make something that would do what you want pretty easy using .NET.

--
Michael D. Dunn

Magenic Technologies
www.magenic.com
blog: http://gotspeech.net/blogs/michaeldunn

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Not a very reliable way, I would think.

Almost all voice recognition (VR hereafter to save typing) software that I
have seen uses computer learning to help understand the way the user
pronounces words. This is done to account for regional accents and such.
For instance, around here they used to produce steel, but they pronounce it
the same as the word still. The VR program has to be able to learn these
variances to be effective in recognizing what the user said. This is
exactly the behavior you do not want if you are teaching pronunciation. You
will need to find a way to disable this learning and check if the
software's unaltered 'acceptable pronunciation range' is narrow enough to
meet your needs.

Also, some computers have a rather tough time keeping up with the VR
software. A long delay followed by half a paragraph of display text are
common on older machines.

Otherwise, you can do this with a bit of VBA and a special textbox during a
presentation. The VBA will need to check the word in this textbox whenever
the text is altered (as entered by the VR software) and then based on a list
of acceptable answers, change something or jump to another slide that looks
the way you want. VBA has its fair share of limitations, so, in many cases,
VBA is not an acceptable answer.

Do you currently use Dragon's VR software?


--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
http://billdilworth.mvps.org
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
vestprog2@ Please read the PowerPoint FAQ pages.
yahoo. They answer most of our questions.
com www.pptfaq.com
..

 

[Christine Fournier]

Thank you for your answer Michael.

Does Vista has voice recognition for French ?

Christine./

 

[Christine Fournier]

Thank you for your answer Bill,

I am not using Dragon Naturally Speaking right now. I was thinking of
getting it and was wondering if it was worthed to get the Professional
version (the only version that works with PowerPoint). Unfortunatly, they
don't have a demo I can download to see if it meets my need.

Christine./

 

[Michael Dunn]

Yes it does! I don't speak french, so I can't say how accurate it is.

--
Michael D. Dunn

Magenic Technologies
www.magenic.com
blog: http://gotspeech.net/blogs/michaeldunn