On speech recognition software

If you can speak English, the chances are you can manipulate computer using some assistive device and speech recognition software. In Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, they have a place called CART (Center for Applied Rehabilitation Technology; http://www.rancho.org/cart/) where they have all kinds of technology for disabled people, and this is where I first learned about assistive devices and experienced speech recognition software.

The first software I used is called “Dragon Naturallyspeaking” version 9 Preferred Edition developed by Nuance (http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/). The software is so good and popular that it is even used by normal person with slow typing. The software is only $150 or so and installs on Windows XP right away. It takes more than 1 GB of space on hard drive and at least 1-2 GB of memory. I was really getting used to this program and was becoming a fan of it.

On January 2007, Microsoft introduced Windows Vista which was equipped with its own speech recognition software. It comes in 7 different languages including 1 Japanese and 2 Chinese but no Korean. Even so I find the speech recognition software of Windows Vista to be far superior to Dragon Naturallyspeaking. Windows Vista has clever features which are quite beneficial like ‘show numbers’ command which highlights all available buttons. Currently I am using Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (English version) on Dell laptop computer XPS M1710 with 2 GB of memory. One thing I like about my Dell computer is that it has 6 USB connections. For the most part, I only need Windows Vista but there are a few applications where Windows Vista speech recognition software does not work well and I have to rely on Dragon Naturallyspeaking version 9.5 (Windows Vista compatible version). So I have both installed on my laptop computer.

In the market I found Korean version of speech recognition software called “By Voice” which costs about 150,000 KRW. The latest version of the software is dated 2002, and I found the software to be not even worth trying. I don’t know whether it is the poor development or the difficulty of the language that is to blame but anyhow it is a bad news for Korean handicapped people.