[Chickensoup]

Thank you.

[Vision Thing]

Starting back in 2003, Microsoft Office (including Word) had Voice Command built into it. I’m sure the Microsoft Vista operating system (including the latest version of Office) has expanded upon Voice Command even further, but I don’t have it, so I’m not sure.

[devane617]

NaturalySpeaking9

http://www.nuancestore.com/v2.0-img/operations/scansoft/site/367062/367062_dns-talk.html

I too have adisability and have tested this software. It gets aboutb 95% with practice.

[JayNorth]

On Kim Komando this morning she said Vista has speech recognition built in. I haven’t played with it, so don’t know how good or bad it is. I do know Microsoft Sync in Ford vehicles works darn well, if they used the same code base for both products.

[puppypusher]

All you need is speech recognition software.You don’t need a new laptop.

As far as what brand you should by.I’ll leave that up to someone else.You might get a reccomendation from CNET.Com though.

[kingu]

The Dell XPS M1530 has 4gb ram, a very fast dual core processor, and is a relatively hardy machine. At just over a grand, it's reasonably affordable.

[Petronski]

Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.0 Preferred hits 99+% on my 2.0 GHz Celeron with 1 Gb. Get a good noise-canceling mike and it will run great on any XP machine.

[montag813]

/sONY VAIO laptop, Centrino (Pentium M) 1.86GHz, 2GB of RAM, Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Medical. Runs like a charm, very accurate if not quite realtime enough. I use a GN Netcom USB headset and accuracy is very high with it.

[EasySt]

Right now, ThinkPad T-61 and T-61P models can be had from Lenovo for a decent price. These are workhorse laptops that will handle Dragon and anything else you are likely to throw at them, nicely. Three Gigs is probably plenty, but you can order it with 3.5 or 4 or more.

[LZ_Bayonet]

http://tinyurl.com/bhq4q

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I am rather puzzled. I have long thought would be a natural evolution to voice recognition software would be to combine in with two other existing softwares.

Text to voice and artificial intelligence.

Text to voice so that your computer can talk back to you, and artificial intelligence, so it has something to say.

Much of what the AI would do would be to figure out the normal patterns that users have for their daily routines on computer. This means that it begins much like a complex macro, but provides interactive options by voice.

The AI works in the background, and while “aware” of open programs, its functions both apply to them and transcend them.

But I haven’t heard of these being integrated as of yet.

[dangerdoc]

I’ve been using voice dictation full time at work for the last eight years.

Any modern computer is going to have the memory and horse power to run the software. My first dictation computer was a pentium 166 with somthing like 64 megs of ram and running windows 98. It was a little slow. The current computer is about 5 years old running XP, not sure of the processor and memory but I’m sure you would have a hard time buying a new computer that would not be considerably faster and it it nearly instantaneous.

A few cautions.

You will need to buy a good professional quality microphone. It is probably the most important piece of hardware.

You will need to train the software and it will take hours.

Regardless of which product you buy, how fast your computer runs and how good your microphone is, it will be less than 99% accurate which means you will have multiple errors on each page. The errors will be similar to what you are trying to say and will be difficult to spot. And the computer will develop an evil sense of humor and try to twist what you say into a naughty limeric. I was once nearly sued because the error in the dictation made it sound like a client was injured by pleasuring himself.

I use a commercial program at work, Dictaphone and Kurzweil prior to that. At home I used Dragon which seemed just as accurate as the more expensive software.