Donald D Henson wrote:
Does anyone know of an Open Source application to accept continuous speech and convert it to text? I've found a couple of proprietary apps but you have to use Voice mail as an input. Any suggestions appreciated.
Don Henson
A couple of weeks ago it was suggested that I try a product from Nuance call dragon Naturally Speaking. As this was a non-open source product, I had to pay for it. Bummer. However, my problem was serious enough that I decided to go with a product that I had to pay for. I also promised the list that I would post a review after using the product for a couple of weeks. Here's the review. The cost was $100 plus shipping. After using the product or a while, I decided it was worth the money. Your mileage may vary. The product came on two CDs, one of which came in a paper jacket on which was printed a serial number. The EULA was a typical Microsoft EULA with the exception of the activation method. The activation method required an Internet connection and involved sending to Nuance something called a machine fingerprint. I don't know what that was or is, but I'm told that this product can only be used on the machine that I activated. This was confirmed by someone on the list. The install went very well. One thing Microsoft products do well is to install. The initial setup included reading a couple of paragraphs for about 30 seconds to initially train the product. Somewhere on their website they state no training required. I rationalize that by assuming that no formal training is required. In any case, the initial set up required about 30 minutes and appeared to work very well. Since dragon only has a Windows version, and since about 99.9% of my applications reside on on a Linux box, I had to set up a CIFS link between my two machines, and then use my Windows box to do the speech to text conversion and then transfer the text to my Linux box. It's actually easier than it sounds, and I find that if I have a message of about three lines or less, it's easier and faster to use a keyboard. Otherwise, Dragon gives an advantage. I find that the accuracy of the conversion depends heavily on how tired I am. :-) Seriously, I get very good conversion accuracy in the early morning and the accuracy degrades slightly during the day. I'm dictating this one in the early morning and the conversions are very good. While I haven't collected any real data, my impression is that the conversion accuracy is improving over time. My main nit pick about the conversion process is that it insists on inserting commas and periods in places where I don't want them. I think there's a way to turn that off but I haven't discovered it yet. Overall, I like the product. I don't care much for the EULA but since they're the only product around. I guess I'll have to go see put up with it. (See the Additional period after "product around"?) If you have a sufficient need, this is a good product. Don Henson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org