[Cube] Re: British English

[Helen Lowe]

Hello listers

thanks to those who responded to my ViaVoice questions.  I had quite a 
helpful correspondence with the support person at ScanSoft, who have the 
licence to market this product now.

ViaVoice 10.3 seems to work ok with OSX once you get over the extremely 
non-intuitive installation procedure.

Re: British English, this is in the system preferences, and I finally found 
it hidden well down the list.
I don't know why you can't install ViaVoice with its own preferences, but 
there you go. You also have to make sure the microphone provided is selected 
in the Sound preferences.

After that it seemed to take the "training" texts quite well, although the 
British English texts were different from the American English ones, and 
there were fewer of them.

I'm finding straight dictation works quite well. In fact, I'm quite 
impressed. e.g. if I say "Samuel Pepys", it comes out exactly right. A bit 
annoying if I want "Samuel peeps" though!

But nothing in the software is intuitive, you really have to learn how to do 
things. Very time-intensive, eg to learn basic formatting commands. Nothing 
pops up on the screen. Another nuisance I find is that if you leave the 
microphone running it can pick up odd sounds and start construing them as 
commands - eg closing documents, etc. But I haven't yet worked out how to 
instruct it to do the same commands.

If you've got the time then it could be a good resource, especially for 
those of us with RSI from years of typing.

In the end, could save a lot of time, but in the meantime I can only meet 
deadlines by traditional keyboard input.