[MV] Re: Dictation Only VV?

[T. Patrick Henebry]

>I was using VV.  I had 10.1.5 but when I upgraded to 10.2.6 it 
>stopped working entirely; says that the mic isn't connected.  At 
>this point I am not using any dictation product.  It never did work 
>very well and I found that I spent as much time making corrections 
>as if I had just typed it in the first place (I type at under 
>20wpm).  I did d/l and install the patch for 10.2.x that I found but 
>it didn't help.
>
>In general, even with cerebral palsy, the voice to text under VV is 
>slower than pecking at the keyboard for me.

Robert,

I to have cerebral palsy and I find ViaVoice to be a godsend. 
Without ViaVoice my typing speed is approximately 11 words per 
minute; but with ViaVoice I can consistently reach 100 words per 
minute with an approximately 98% accuracy rate.  I did take the time 
to read all of the training texts (though not all at once).  I also 
had ViaVoice analyze approximately 25,000 words worth of documents of 
the type I typically dictate.  Over my years of using speech 
recognition I have found that 25,000 words is the smallest amount you 
want to analyze, otherwise you risk actually degrading recognition 
accuracy. 

Proper hardware is also key.  Speech recognition is an application 
that is very demanding in terms of both processor cycles and memory. 
Based on my personal experience I would not use ViaVoice for Mac OS X 
on anything less than 800 MHz G4 with 768 MB of RAM.

Fortunately for me my voice is completely unaffected by the cerebral 
palsy; but I know that is not the case for everyone with cerebral 
palsy.  The type of speech problems associated with cerebral palsy 
can make the use of speech recognition programs extremely difficult 
if not outright impossible for those who have these speech problems.

If your voice is normal, you have taken the time to read the training 
texts, and you have the proper hardware it is simply a matter of time 
and practice before you become extremely productive with speech 
recognition software.  Contrary to the advertising claims dictation 
is not natural speech, but a learned skill.  You won't reach 100 
words per minute with a 98% accuracy rate right away, but it is 
possible.  For me having ViaVoice for Mac OS X is what enables me to 
be productive on a Macintosh I would be happy to do what I can to 
help you with ViaVoice. 

As for ViaVoice not hearing the microphone once you upgraded to 
Jaguar that is a known problem easily fixed by making some changes to 
your System Preferences.

Quit ViaVoice and open System Preferences then:

1) Click Sound followed by the Input tab.

2) next choose the microphone you have connected to the Mac rather 
than the internal microphone.

3) Click Show All to get back to the main Preferences panel.

4) Click Sound followed by the On/Off tab.

5) make sure Apple Speakable items is set to OFF.

6) Click the  Listening  tab.

7) Down at the bottom set Microphone to the microphone you have 
connected to the Mac.

8) close System Preferences.

One or more of these preferences may already be correctly set, but 
you need to check them all.

Also, installing the Jaguar related update to ViaVoice found here:
<http://www-3.ibm.com/software/speech/support/us/vvmac3_update.html> 
is a MUST for fixing other Jaguar related problems.  According to the 
sites it is only for OS X 10.2.2, but it works under later versions. 
I suspect IBM just has not tested it with anything higher than 10.2.2.
-- 
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T. Patrick Henebry