Is Office XP Speech Recognition Worth Pressing On With

[Guy Smith]

Years ago I tried speech recognition under win98 and gave up. I am now
trying it with XP Prof and XP Office using a Plantronics Audio45 USB (1.1).
Under set-up/training it works fine but dictating into Word most of it is
rubbish and inconsistent. Is it worth pressing on with?

I have tried:
Training user - lots.
Setting up a new user - incase original user was corrupted from using old
mic.
Updating Mic driver
Installed Plantronics ProSolo control panel.
Tested Mic in record and playback - worked well.
Looked at the capacity of my laptop seems OK - Everest System Report Attached

 

[Bob I]

If you had a desktop with double the memory and CPU that was twice as
fast, you would probably do ok. If you crank up the recognition you will
kill the response time for dictation purposes.

 

[Don Taylor]

Years ago I tried speech recognition under win98 and gave up.
I am now trying it with XP Prof and XP Office using a Plantronics
Audio45 USB (1.1).
Under set-up/training it works fine but dictating into Word most of
it is rubbish and inconsistent. Is it worth pressing on with?

I have tried:
Training user - lots.
Setting up a new user - incase original user was corrupted from using
old
mic.
Updating Mic driver
Installed Plantronics ProSolo control panel.
Tested Mic in record and playback - worked well.
Looked at the capacity of my laptop seems OK - Everest System Report
Attached

There is some good advice on improving recognition quality here:
http://www.emicrophones.com/docdetails.asp?documentid=38

My experience after having put in hundreds of hours working on this
is that there is still way too much random trial and error, with no
clear feedback about what is wrong when it doesn't work or what to
change to make it better, a lot like trying to figure out how to
find and fix some problem with Windows XP.

 

[David Candy]

MS has done speech recognition for years (well over 10). It didn't work in Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and it still doesn't work 12 years later.

 

[Don Taylor]

MS has done speech recognition for years (well over 10). It didn't work =
in Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and it still doesn't work 12 years later.

Yesterday the planets were in alignment or my chakra was the righ color,
speech recognition could make no mistakes, all the errors were my own.
I was amazed, I hadn't seen this quality ever before.

Today my carma was on the fritz and I fought with it for five hours
when yesterday I would have been done in two, and without the errors.

It can work, even surprisingly well at times. And at other times it
doesn't, without giving any clue about what is wrong with it.

Just like, as I said, Windows, or networking. And I don't think that
is necessary.

 

[David Candy]

Your post is my point.