Computer, speak to me
Written on Jan 16, 2008 // Software.And take notes while you’re at it.
Or, in other words, I’m wondering what the current state of text to speech and speech to text software is. Given the amount of hours in a day and looking at my todo list and it’s clear I’ve got a problem. Or problem… I simply can’t squeeze everything in those mere 24 hours, especially if you take out time for such boring things as sleeping, working and commuting. Commuting takes me about 2 hours a day, so it would be brilliant if I could do something else while driving to and back from work.
Which got me thinking, it would be lovely if I could plonk some software on a laptop or ultra portable and have it, for example, read out the news to me from a batch of selected RSS feeds. Equally it would be brilliant if the damn thing would listen to my voice so I could operate it, and have it take notes, for example I could dictate whole blog entries, or finally note down all the ideas I get for new stuff which I for some reason mostly forget once I get out of the car.
Is there anyone who has any experience with doing anything like this, either on Windows, Os X or any flavor of Linux?
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Corvo
Jan 16, 2008, 9:01Atleast this idea didn’t vaporize away in a car.
But alas, I don’t know how to do this kind of thing.
Just wanted to say that I like it.
Littlemog
Jan 16, 2008, 19:48ViaVoice is apparently an award winning speech recognition software. I had problems when I had it (it could also read your work back to you), but that was at least 7 years ago and it was a “packaged with a game” version - now it probably doesn’t require two hours of you saying random sentances, or if it does, doesn’t get it totally wrong when you’re finished. I don’t know if there’s a demo version availiable to see how accurate it is before you buy, or freeware versions?
XIII
Jan 16, 2008, 19:35Yeah, there’s a lot of freeware stuff out there, of course especially for the linux crowd, but it’s hard to find any real world reports of people using it, much less for what I have in mind.