4 stars (Might change my fiance's life!!!!!) - My girlfriend has Multiple Sclerosis and has become limited in her ability to type. She was using an on-screen keyboard with a mouse, when I met her. One day I watched her type a short note to her mother she spent hours on two paragraphs. I told her that there had to be a better way and after a short search found ViaVoice. It was affordable and we decided to give it a try. We installed it the day it came and right away she was able to use its built in word processor to write letters to friends and family. We've only been working with it for 2 weeks, now, but it is a vast improvement over the onscreen keyboard. She can dictate a letter and make corrections in a fraction of the time possible before.
I hate that it seems tied to Microsoft but it seems to be adaptable to other software systems. We are learning togather, it's fun.
3 stars (Continuous speech recognition needs a VERY fast CPU and RAM) - Those that say this software is "unstable" do not take into consideration the VERY high cpu usage needed to perform continuous speech recognition (as ooposed to "discrete" speech dictation used in IBM VoiceType, which was possible on a Pentium 1 233 Mhz, and required users to pause between words).
In short: get a gigabyte of ram, specially if you're using WinXP. If you run Win2000 with 512MB ram, try to add an extra 256mb stick.
And your cpu should be at the very least a 2Ghz Pentium 4, or higher, despite what the box claims. With these requirements in mind, the software works as advertised in my experience.
2 stars (Good recognition, but very unstable program) - This is my first experience with dictation software, so I don't have anything to compare it to. All I can do is offer observations on how this one has worked for me.
Training this software takes quite a long time; a few hours if you want to get maximum performance. I actually wouldn't mind so much, except that you need to retrain it every time you buy a new microphone or work in an environment with a different sound level. For me, this has meant having to train the software several times. Reading the provided material so the software can sample your voice is actually kind of fun, but after you've done it a few times (reading the same passages to train for different microphones or environments), it is exceptionally tedious. I wish they had provided a larger selection of reading material.
The headphones which come with the software are adequate, but I heard you can get better recognition with a higher quality set. (I upgraded to a Plantronics Audio 90, which is better, but not one I'd recommend.)
My biggest complaint about the software is that it consumes a tremendous amount of system resources on your computer. I can not be running any other programs at the same time, or it crashes. I am using a computer with a 1.40 GHz Centrino processor with 512MB of RAM. Even when I am running only IBM ViaVoice and MS Word, I clearly run into performance issues. After a while my computer starts to bog down and I have to restart it. My computer's specs are way above what IBM recommends, so that *shouldn't* have been an issue. If a beefier computer would solve my problems, I think IBM should specify "minimal" and "optimal" system requirements. I don't mind if a program is a system hog if the developer is willing to *admit* it and tell me what I need.
More complaints: ViaVoice types with unusual quirks which it seems would have been easy for IBM to have prevented. For example, it often fails to capitalize the first word in a sentence, especially when dictating in chat software. When you dictate for a passage to be in quotation marks, it leaves a space between the quotation marks and the words inside the quote. For some words, it seems impossible to get the software to recognize that you are dictating a word, and not issuing a command.
IBM's ViaVoice is considerably cheaper than the competition. Unfortunately, I have no idea if the higher price of the competing product (Dragon) is justified by being a higher-quality product. ViaVoice is probably adequate for most casual dictating needs. If you've never used dictation software before, it's really impressive the way it can usually understand what you're saying. The more you use it, the better it gets at recognizing what you are saying, and the better you will get at enunciating in a way it can understand. After a few months of casual usage, I would say my software is hitting 90 to 95% accuracy (higher under ideal conditions with simple words).
The bottom line is, for the price, this is pretty good software (though I sure do wish it was more stable). If you use dictation a lot and know that the competing products are better quality, they would be worth the price. But for a casual user, this software is fine. |
