speech to type app?

A

Amw66

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
This post seeks to find if anyone has a decent apple and / or andorid app for speech to type. The reasons for this are twofold
My stepbrother had a horrendous head injury years ago, and whilst he has made a remarkable recovery, the partial lobotomy necessitated for pressure reduction has induced a bit of obsessive behaviour ( he is obsessed with detail). He has done brilliantly by qualifying as a building surveyor, however his surveys take ages and typing them up is a nightmare.

I had suggested sourcing an app top let him dictate whilst doing the survey ( dictaphone or iphone) that could type the dictation up - leaving him to edit.

For my daughter this kind of app would be brilliant for education - writing and typing can be so tiring. She can dissect a short piece of prose or visual media brilliantly, but then typing/ writing it out can floor her
Any suggestions?
 
I use Dragon Naturally Speaking with my PC sometimes and it's pretty good. I followed the advice in Scott Baker's book about 'Training Your Dragon' and I think that probably helped it to be more accurate straight out of the box. It might be worth considering getting a cheap/secondhand PC just for this if the alternatives aren't very good.

I got the home version of Dragon (v. 13), which is just under £70 on Amazon and it's been well worth it for me. I've even been able to adjust it to my speaking very quietly (due to lack of energy).
 
I've been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for 20 years and upgrading to newer versions occasionally. There is a new version now that I think is #15. There is a premium version of that that I am going to get that will read back what you said. I had older versions that did that and it was very helpful to do that to correct mistakes. And it certainly does make mistakes!
 
I should add that several years ago I was listening to an interview with Ray Kurzweil who basically invented speech recognition. He said he doesn't use it because it makes too many mistakes and that if you can type 50 words per minute that is easier. Using the speech program with a keyboard works best for me because I am a poor typist.
 
Thank you for the suggestions. I' ll check these out.
I know that my stepbrother will be limited to linking up a phone/ dictaphone whilst carrying out the survey to link up with a pc/ tablet at home. He is a totally " apple" person

My daughter is more flexible as it could be phone or laptop. She' s andriod software at moment .

So thanks for covering all the bases .
 
Both Mac and iOS have decent built in speech recognition. I assume Windows and Android would too but I have no experience with those.

Dragon dictate is available on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android if the built in stuff doesn’t work properly for them. Although it appears to be a subscription payment for iOS and Android which could get expensive over time.
 
My problem with typing is that I get writer's hand. It's like the yips for writers. Your hand cramps up but the cramps can spread to other parts of the body and it feels really weird. I used to get one vein on my wrist bunching up and sticking out weirdly too.

I can type pretty fast, mainly because I used to do new accounts for a bank (inputting store card application details in about eighty seconds flat). But it's definitely not good for your hands and wrists to work at that speed for long.
 
The built in dictation in the Mac is really good, and works with your own word processing software, so you can see the words you say being typed into your file as you speak them. So if it does get anything wrong, you can change it as you go. The standard mac operating system offers a number of different accents for English, which is another plus. Once you get the hang of it, you only tend to get mistakes on proper names and very technical words. Which I guess is fair enough.

There are speech commands for punctuation - for example, you can say "comma","full stop (or period in US English)", semi-colon, new line, etc.

It takes a while to get used to speaking in the same way as you write. You have to be kind of sure of what you want to say. And you need to be away from other people talking (doorbells and other nonspeech sounds are okay, it knows they're not speech; funnily enough, dog barks are translated as "aye, aye", at least in my English version!).
 
To be frivolous for a moment, my kids and I tried speech-to-text software about 20 years ago, watching the screen as we spoke. We got the giggles at the mistakes it made. It tried to write our giggles as text too, which led to collapsing into helpless laughter and abandoning the attempt!

To be more serious, I find speaking more physically exhausting than typing, so it would, I think, be no use for me. But I can see it can be valuable for lots of people, so it's good to hear modern versions are better.
 
Trish said:
To be frivolous for a moment, my kids and I tried speech-to-text software about 20 years ago, watching the screen as we spoke. We got the giggles at the mistakes it made. It tried to write our giggles as text too, which led to collapsing into helpless laughter and abandoning the attempt!

To be more serious, I find speaking more physically exhausting than typing, so it would, I think, be no use for me. But I can see it can be valuable for lots of people, so it's good to hear modern versions are better.
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It can also be useful for writers because of what I call 'the tyranny of the blank page'. Many people don't know where to begin, so don't. But wittering on is much easier, and at least gives you some text to work with.

Similarly, with ME, I do often experience loss of motivation that coincides with increasing fatigue. I want to do things but find it hard to start them (although continuing things I've already started is somewhat easier). I suppose it's dopamine related (at least, that's what they say for MS motivational fatigue). Voice-to-text is a way to circumvent that. Talking doesn't feel quite so taxing, intellectually. I realise others will be the opposite, though.
 
I had bought a copy of Dragon years ago but i found i could not think out loud. I could type what i was thinking but when i tried to verbalize instead of type my brain locked up. I have no idea why and i still have the CD kicking around and never tried it again.
 
Squeezy said:
This is all brilliant advice, thank you @Amw66 for your timely thread! My son is dyslexic and these apps and programmes will be useful for him too.
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Someone I know well is dyslexic (can read by guessing but can’t even choose the right word from a list or guess the first letter most of the time). We used to have to translate everything he wrote so it was even legible. He uses the built in dictation on his iPhone for everything now. It seems to learn from past usage so it gets better as you go along. But some very regular things it refuses to learn and sometimes it starts to get the sentence right and then changes it to a random teen speak phrase.
He finds it indispensible and very freeing. I have got to know his dictation voice as he gets things done around the house now: sort of like a computer text reader, quite stilted, works best.

I tried it myself for creative writing but found it maddening. I think you have to be saying things it expects (so whatever is all over the internet already).

Definitely worth a try, and persisting with it for a bit.
 
@Subtropical Island I can't imagine the frustration of being that seriously dyslexic. Growing up and going to school couldn't have been easy for him.

Luckily my son's dyslexia is nothing like as bad. He can read, but he stumbles a lot, ignores punctuation, and it's just sheer hard work.

He much prefers to badger me for spellings of words to type into Google etc than use the very good voice recognition on his phone. :thumbsdown:He's 15, and supposedly this generation is technologically advanced. Yeah.
 
adambeyoncelowe said:
It can also be useful for writers because of what I call 'the tyranny of the blank page'. Many people don't know where to begin, so don't. But wittering on is much easier, and at least gives you some text to work with.

Similarly, with ME, I do often experience loss of motivation that coincides with increasing fatigue. I want to do things but find it hard to start them (although continuing things I've already started is somewhat easier). I suppose it's dopamine related (at least, that's what they say for MS motivational fatigue). Voice-to-text is a way to circumvent that. Talking doesn't feel quite so taxing, intellectually. I realise others will be the opposite, though.
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A trick I learned in school that can be very helpful now with ME is to start off with something along the lines of “What I’m thinking is that...”

Usually I have a topic in mind or even have something specific to write down but with brain fog you can often sort of see it right there in your head, yet somehow be completely unable to access it. Starting the first sentence like above gives me a sort of hook into those thoughts, as well as dealing with the blank page overwhelm. Then I can edit it into something that sounds a bit smarter later.

Sometimes a bullet list works better as a starter, if I know what I want to write but can’t figure out where to start.

To get back to speech-to-text, Mr. Pants had some very persistent inflammation issues in both wrists a while back and tested several types of software to be able to work at all. In the end the built in one on his Mac was the best one, at least for English, like @Woolie mentioned as well.
 
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