Speech recognition software

[Muse]

I was talking to my brother the other day and he said that he tires very quickly at the keyboard. He suffered some kind of injury and had surgery on a tendon in his hand a couple of years ago or so and he says that a couple of minutes are all he can type at once now and his hand gives out. I thought of and mentioned the fact that there are speech recognition softwares out there that make it possible for him to speak into a microphone and generate text on his computer. I used to be quite curious about these about 15 years ago but haven't been following the trend and developments. I remember hearing about Dragon Naturally Speaking. Is this the best software? There are a number of different versions available at their website, so I wouldn't know what to tell my brother. Is DNS the best idea for him actually?

In fact, my brother is a surgeon, closing in on retirement and as such has taken the post of Chief of Staff at the hospital he works at. This is a principally administrative position (I think) and he probably has occasion to use a computer, maybe I lot, I figure (I haven't talked to him about that). I suppose this might influence what might be the best decision on this.

Thanks for any information.

 

[mechBgon]

Windows Vista has speech recognition capabilities, so that might be worth trying. I don't know how it compares to a dedicated product, but it wasn't too bad in my experimentation. I got more tired of talking than of typing, myself 😀

 

[Schadenfroh]

Well, when I trained at my vocational technology school (5+ years ago), my instructor preached that it was the best. I do not know about now.

 

[Noema]

Vista's Speech Recognition actually works pretty well.

 

[Muse]

I think my brother's probably running Windows 2000 Pro. I have a feeling it will be less trouble for him to install Dragon NS than Vista. He's not very good with computers.