The king is dead (Viavoice), long live to the king (Dragon NaturallySpeaking)

So last week I had set one of my "techy" goal as “to install Viavoice” to try to improve efficiency of mail messaging work as well as improving my patent disclosure write-up (keeping up "typing" speed as fast as the flow of my thoughts..).
Here is a recap of what I went through to get “enabled” for STT technology (Speech-To-Text)

Mon:

- Time ot find latest version Viavoice (10.5), took about 1 day & half to find it between day-to-day work – spent about 1h altogether searching on web.

Tue:

- After installation, I’ve discovered there was an issue with sound driver detection , right at the start when viavoice set-up wizard starts-up. Searched again on web for solution, took me about 4 hours to find that many people had same problem as myself but NO solution found!

Wed:

- searched on internal IBM sites, found Viavoice forum, same problem had been reported but no solution given.

- used an new internal app/tool & I’ve found people related to Viavoice, sent mail to them. Got one response, was given the name of the expert to contact.

Thu:

- Received reply from expert, the possible work around was to purchase a USB microphone..

I was not very hot investing in something that may not work, so at this stage the only thing left for me to do was revert back to my initial choice (fully working solution), which was Dragon SW but this meant a cost to bear.. Hmm, Do I really want/need this, how much this SW will help me..!?

To my surprise, on Thu evening I’ve received a mail invitation to participate in the Alpha pilot of D-NS (Dagron NaturallySpeaking) deployment in IBM.

WOW! Whoever is up there looking after me, “You are doing a great Job and I Thank you for it! ”

Fri:

- Installed SW on Friday night, trained the SW, tested the SW (from 7pm to 2am)

Sat/Sun:

- Did carried out more tests whenever I got the opportunity..

Results / feedback to date on “first” experience, take too much time to capture my words, I ended up having to speak very slowly. In fact I typed faster that the SW, so no much benefit to me, but… I am thinking that I may have been too fast at training the SW. During my reading, I have made mistakes & repeated words, (kids were also around making noise) )so my plan for this week is to create a new profile & do a “proper” training (noiseless) then will report outcome here in next few days..!

del.icio.us Tags: speech-to-text,dragon-sw,tts,text-to-speech,dragon_naturallyspeaking,viavoice,stt,d-ns,tools,apps software,voice_recognition