Good voice to text software?

[Esg876]

Hi, 

 

Cousin in uni is asking for a good voice to text software, hes slow at typing and wants something that he can read his notes to and have transcribe everything so he can search it etc later on. 

 

Any good apps that can do this? willing to pay a bit if the app is worth it, thanks!

[corrado33]

Good speech to text is expensive. I believe the "gold standard" is Dragon Naturally Speaking.

 

I tried it many years ago. If you spend a few hours "training" it, it works pretty well. The more you "train" it the better it will work. Training it consists of reading something on the screen (like a page from a book etc.)

 

However, I believe both mac AND pc have their own built in speech to text.... I mean apple has had it since OS 9, unsure if it's still in OS X.

[vanished]

Although this ability has become much more common (think google assistant, etc.), it's still very difficult to do well, particularly when the language used isn't very common and basic.  The ability to detect which words you're saying goes down considerably as the dictionary of expected words increases, and I can imagine in a university class of any kind there would be a large amount of this uncommon language, so I would worry that this won't work very well no matter what.  My advice would be to first give it a test run trying to dictate to google docs or something like that.

[corrado33]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Although this ability has become much more common (think google assistant, etc.), it's still very difficult to do well, particularly when the language used isn't very common and basic.  The ability to detect which words you're saying goes down considerably as the dictionary of expected words increases, and I can imagine in a university class of any kind there would be a large amount of this uncommon language, so I would worry that this won't work very well no matter what.  My advice would be to first give it a test run trying to dictate to google docs or something like that.

THIS site claims to use google's voice recognition. 

 

Also the most IMPORTANT thing is a good microphone. If you're planning on using your laptop's microphone it's just not going to work at all. Check out the recommended microphones for Rosetta stone and buy one of those. 

[vanished]

Just now, corrado33 said:

THIS site claims to use google's voice recognition. 

If so that would work the same way.  imo, it's worth a try since it's free and easy

[corrado33]

Apparently on mac it's called "dictation". Just go into textedit and press the Fn (function) key twice. Or "Edit" then "Start Dictation" Pretty sure it just uses siri's text recognition (if you enable the "enhanced" mode.)

[Esg876]

Thanks guys, I'll have him try the free site and buy a mic for his laptop. Dragon is unfortunately just way out of his price range