Adventures In Speech Recognition

I tried speech recognition Back in the days of Win XP . I couldn't get it to recognize my words . Maybe it's my southern accent. Maybe it's the slight lisp I have because I lost my four front teeth when I was four. Whatever the reason, I gave it a very lengthy try, and gave up. I tried it again when I got a Vista computer. Same same. But now I have Windows 7. I installed speech recognition to try to get Kindle for PC to read books for me while I play World Of Warcraft. To install it, I had to train it to recognize my voice. After three days, I still can't get it to read from Kindle for PC. But, I have pretty good results getting it to type from my dictation.

 

This has opened a whole new world to me! It hurts to hold my arms up and type. This has been such a problem for me, that I haven't worked on my books for over a year. Thursday morning, I worked on a new story for about 3 hours.  I dictated it. I am still learning how to get it to go to certain places in my document. I still spend a fair amount of time correcting things it misunderstands. But my unscientific perception is that I am getting more done than if I typed it the conventional way. Sometimes my little speech recognition robot sticks, and I have to use the mouse. But overall, it's faster to speak it than to type it.

 

It has its finicky moments.  To use it with  OpenOffice, I need a piece of software called Java Bridge. I downloaded the Java Bridge, but the install failed.  Many times. So I can't use it with OpenOffice.  Yet. I will wait a bit and install it again. But I can dictate my stories to WordPad, then copy and paste.  This will not help me much when I'm editing an existing story, however.

 

To use it with World Of Warcraft chat, I have to dictate to a notepad file, then copy and paste.  World Of Warcraft is not very handicapped friendly. I wish it supported speech recognition.  Just for chat.  It would make my world of warcraft life so much easier.

 

To start your own adventures in speech recognition, go to your start menu on Win 7, and type " speech recognition". May it work with the programs you use.

 

I left a few errors in this post to show what kind of things I have to correct while using speech recognition.

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