Speech Recognition Software – Give it a Go!

July 2021

Hello Readers, I trust you are all well.

I was going to write an article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) this month. I changed my mind tonight when I arrived home as my wife was stressed. My wife is currently enhancing her caring skills and studying Autism and Aspergers. The course was demaning and had a strict deadline and involved a lot of typing. One handed typing was not working for my wife.

I remembered a client in Moutlon who had travelled the world and wanted to write their memoirs. They were not good at typing and so we tried the speech facility within Wndows.

I was actually blown away on how good it was. It was accessible and easy to use and very accurate.

The idea of being able to talk to your computer has been around for decades. The best programme in the United Kingdom has always been considered to be “Dragon Naturally Speaking”.

Dragon was born before the inernet, cloud computing and AI. Dragon trained their software over time with your voice and it gradually got better. However, it didn’t benefit from the wider cohort of people who wanted to use speech recognition.

The current Microsoft Windows speeech recognition is quite impressive as it can anonymously collect data from many people to get better. Your computer learns about how you speak and starts to understand you more.

When starting to use speech recognition, a lot of people think that you should talk to the computer like a robot.

With the cloud and AI, this is no longer necessary as you can just talk naturally. The more comfortable you get with that, the voice recognition will go back and adjust as you talk as context is understood.

Another top tip: You also don’t need to shout at your computer. Your computer has good hearing and does not suffer from Tinitus!

If you want to talk to your Windows computer, hold down the windows key and press the letter “H”. Mac users please help me out as I don’t have a Mac.

You may be asked to do a couple of things if you have not used the feature before.

Voice recognition is becoming available in many places. I use it in my car for navigation and for calling people and responding to messages.

I would urge you to try voice recognition on your computer, phone and car. It’s getting better.

Voice recognition is coming home…