Are you one of the many office workers or home teleworkers who really hate typing? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had the means to create programs that allowed a person to just talk into their computer and it types what has been said?
Not to worry! The time is here, and you can train your computer to type for you, using your own voice patterns to teach it to type as you speak. There are several great voice recognition programs that are available on the market today. Once the software is installed and the training is done, it will become your best friend.
Speech recognition converts spoken words to a machine readable input. Perhaps you already have a speech recognition program installed on your computer and don’t even know about it. If you have Windows XP and have Office both installed on your computer, you can easily check. By opening Microsoft Word and looking under the Tools tab, if you see the word Speech, then you have a nice speech program already available to you that gives you a floating toolbar and is not a very hard program to use. You will have to have a microphone and speakers, such a headset.
Not only can you use the WP Office Speech program, but there are other programs on the market which may also be used. You can obtain programs for medical professions that are equipped with medical vocabularies and terminologies. Or you may be in a legal practitioner, and need the legal terminologies. You can also get speech programs for Dental and Veterinary practices as well as the dictation program.
These programs don’t just take a word for word dictation as one may think, but it will attempt to adjust the spellings of words based on the content of the sentence. The programs will analyze the sentences all together, and you may not see anything on the monitor until you finish talking. Stopping in mid sentence will reduce the programs ability to transcribe what it hears. It takes a few seconds for the program to figure out what you were saying.
You would first start by teaching your computer the basic commands that you would be using most often first, such as “open internet”, “yahoo search”, “enter”. Schools are realizing the future of computers and are starting to teach computers to 2nd graders. As these 2nd graders become more educated and as they develop their voice skills they will be moved to the more sophisticated voice recognition programs. The speech recognition programs are very helpful for students or people with certain types of disabilities. They are a fantastic program for people with arthritis.
You may not realize it but we have had speech recognition installed on our cell phones, and our car navigators, ever since they were made available to the public. Whether we have used them or not the program is still there.