Has anyone ever used speech recognition software for word processing etc?

What are some good products?

Are any of them reliable?

discuss

Never used one, but apparent Dragon Natural Speak is suppose to be ok.

But if you're using Windows XP, it comes with some speech recongition software as well.

(plz fix subject typo)

I tried IBM's one a couple of years ago; I was doing a lot of writing at the time and I was getting s***ted off having to type so much. I found it good, but not good enough to replace my keyboard. Recognition time was too laggy for me to want to use it for regular desktop stuff. Accuracy wasn't good enough for general purpose dictation. I spent quite a bit of time training it but never really got it to the level of accuracy that I wanted.

This was approx. 2 years ago, I'm sure with faster CPUs and software upgrades it is significantly better now.

When I was looking it was REALLY hard to find a trial version; I think I ended up going to Harvey Norman to get one from them. Its really annoying you can't just download a demo.

I should have also mentioned, Dragon got a pretty good rap, in some cases better than the IBM one. I think a headset w/ noise-cancelling mike is also probably a must.

I tried a few a bit ago, just to save me typing up long drafts. Training them was a bitch, and you. Ended. Up. Speaking. Like. This. It got to the point where it recognised the individual words with a high degree of accuracy, but speak them in a sentence and you'd end up with a load of gibberish. Not that that's a big step up from what I was writing, but hey.

^what he said^

Dragon is OK. You have to do alot of training etc but it works

will open apps, browse etc dictate but really keyboard owns all.

It takes alot of patience to use Dragon and you will get sick of repeating words and saying 'scratch that'

you would be amazed at how many fullstops, commas, symbols, spaces that there are in a .doc and you will have to edit. >>>>>>>>>>TIME SAVED = f*** all.

that is all.