Does anyone have experience with voice recognition under Windows? $RELATIVE has wrist problems and has asked me about getting some dictation software, but I haven't been paying attention to that area and have no idea what is available, how much it costs, or how well it works.

I know that Office XP has some capabilities built-in, but I don't think that's really an option here (on a windows 95 / office 97 system).

I know someone who can't use their arms (I forget what the disease is called, his arms just hang there) and he uses Dragon Dictate and he _loves_ it. I get the impression that he is a picky man.

I tried Dragon Dictate way way back in the Windows 95 (or earlier?) days and for the time, it was nice. Only thing was it sucked up memory like no tomorrow (I think I had a whopping 32 megs or something). It didn't make many mistakes. I haven't tried it since then, but I've heard it's extremely good.

The only drawback is that you have to sit there and train it, but I think they might all be like that.

Oh, and I don't think it's cheap. Hehe...

Good luck :)

The M$ Speech SDK is actually quite good and comes with some rather good samples incl. dictation software....

http://www.microsoft.com/speech/download/sdk51/

Not sure - but you might be able to send them the redistributables and some of the sample apps.

We set it up so that we could "ask" our machines how they were and they would run a quick diagnostic and respond back using speech.

Cheers

There is also IBM's software. They had an Arabic version too. I remember that I got it for a very reasonable price, and you had to teach it too, and it takes a lot of time.

The more you teach it, the better its recognition becomes.

Generally, it was good. I believe it would have been much better in English, but I never got to try that out.