Newsgroups: comp.speech
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From: ted@cs.umn.edu (Ted Stockwell)
Subject: Re: Speech recognition s/w, h/w
In-Reply-To: vachha@cisa.cis.uab.edu's message of Wed, 21 Oct 1992 10:06:48 GMT
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Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1992 20:56:58 GMT
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In article <1992Oct21.100648.23435@cis.uab.edu> vachha@cisa.cis.uab.edu (Rustom_yuppy_Vachha) writes:
>
>   This is a request on behalf of my friend who recently lost his
>   forearm in an industrial accident. 
>     He would like to know if there is any commercially viable
>     PC or Mac based SPEECH RECOIGNITION software that will help
>     him "talk" into a word processing package that will type out
>     the text for him.
>
>   ANY suggesstions on other ways to overcome this handicap (e.g. having a
>   one handed keyboard, etc ) are VERY WELCOME.

First, check out the newsgroup sci.med.occupational.  There are often
discussions about alternative keyboards for people with handicaps
(mostly tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome) and I believe there is
a FAQ posting which includes some information.

From my notes on speech recognition:

Dragon Systems: 
 The DragonDictate speech recognition system has an active vocabulary
of 30,000 words.  25,000 are selected from a dictionary of 80000 words
(phonetic models).  5000 can be trained by the user.  The system
starts with a generic voice model, but is speaker adaptive.  It
requires a distinct pause between each word (mine is set to 0.16
seconds).  This requires a 386 PC (at leased 33 megahertz).  I have
been using mine since January 1991 for programming, email, and news
(including this posting)

DragonDictate works with any ordinary text based DOS program.  To the
application, it looks like the input is coming from the keyboard.

 Last I heard, DragonDictate costs around 9 or $10000.  A stripped
down version for around $3500.  Its called VoiceType and is also sold
by IBM.  It can run on smaller PC's, but has an active vocabulary of
7000 words.

 I believe that DragonDictate was developed by the people from 
Carnegie-Mellon who were responsible for Hearsay.

Phone: (617) 965-5200,
    or (800) 825-5897

Postal address:
Dragon Systems
320 Nevada St.
Newton, MA 02160
USA

--
Ted Stockwell                                     ted@cs.umn.edu
"It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole."  -- Laurie Anderson

