No, I haven’t been driven mad by it. I have recently activated Windows 7 speech recognition. Unlike my early experiments with SR, it actually seems to work. Of course, it has been over a decade since I first encountered this sort of technology and it seems the software and hardware has finally caught up. I’m really quite impressed by it, even with minimal training, the success rate is very high. It actually seems to be a usable tool. Not being the world’s greatest typist, I can see myself using this quite a lot.In fact, I am using it to create this post. I hope this will mean that I can add posts more regularly and give me the time to go into more detail.
The initial reason I looked into it was because I want to transcribe the audio from my DVDs. Whilst Windows 7 SR won’t do this, there is a good plug in which will accept audio files and use this speech recognition engine. Hopefully, this will give me a transcript which can be translated into other languages. Even if the results aren’t one hundred per cent, it will save an enormous amount of audio typing. In the short term, this will allow me to create a PDF file containing the script in different languages which can be distributed with the DVDs. In the longer term, it will allow me to add subtitles or an alternative audio track in your chosen language.