Comments on: Train Windows Vista’s Speech Recognition

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:13:38 +0000

Dragon is the best. I’ve worked extensively with it in the past. If you use it enough it’s scary how accurate it can get.

By: MohJ

MohJ — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:09:43 +0000

Certainly, we have to start somewhere ;). I can already imagine a future when you can speak to your computer as if you’re speaking to another human-being.
P.S: I’ve tried to use a third-party program called Dragon NaturallySpeaking and found that, although not perfect, it’s much more accurate than Windows Speech Recognition. Might be worthwhile for people who care about this kind of stuff to check it out…

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:36:56 +0000

I don’t know. Maybe if you add a few “ho ho hooos” before your comments they might respond :)

By: Santa

Santa — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:20:11 +0000

Are we ever likely to get a comment from someone from Redmond?

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:49:43 +0000

You have to start somewhere.

By: Bambara

Bambara — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:06:43 +0000

Sorry to say this, but the technology as it is present now simply falls short. The concept is great, but the implication is poor. I’ll be sticking with the mouse and keyboard.

By: Santa

Santa — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:19:30 +0000

I have a number of problems with dictation but the four most annoying are:
1. It keeps adding unwanted words (‘and’ is the most common) at the end of a dictated phrase.
2. It has great difficulty recognising common punctuation.
3. I understand that it can mishear words but shouldnt the result still make some kind of sense? (‘and they’re change to our’ was substituted for ‘and they had changed the locks’)
4. It frequently fails to hear the first one or two words of a phrase.

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:35:32 +0000

When you “train it” Windows Speech Recognition listens to how you say words and phrases. It doesn’t memorize how you say every word. It uses what it’s learned by listening to how you say specific words to figure out everything else.

The more you use it properly the more accurate it gets.

By: Del Nabla

Del Nabla — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:26:40 +0000

OK, but the point is that, for instance, the training documents don’t contain the word “code”, and when I dictate this it hears it as “cord”. If the word isn’t in the training document, how can it learn it?

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:09:45 +0000

You can’t add training text. You can start over and train it again as many times as you would like. It learns more about your voice every time. It would be a good idea to dictate a few chapters to train it even further.

Make sure you have a good quality mic and sound card. That makes a difference when it is listening to your voice.