IBM ViaVoice Millennium Pro

This is my first viavoice document, I had thought that it would save a great deal of time, and I expect with time it well. Though it does take a great deal of time to set up. I had thought it would be amusing to type, sorry, speak a document and post it as an unadulterated version. Just to see how funny it could be. The trouble is it seems to work rather well. Though it has taken a long time to get this far. I have had to edit several times so far and I am speaking very slowly. I wonder whether or not I could type this as quick, I think I probably could. Hopefully I will learn to use this better in the future. Just to show you how accurate the ...  Read the complete review

Imagine never having to touch your keyboard again. Imagine writing your opinions simply by talking to your computer, and seeing the words magically appear on the screen. More importantly imagine school pupils with severe learning problems producing coherent essays by using their powers of speech alone. This is the scenario promised by voice recognition software. There are three main players in the field: IBM, Dragon and Phillips. I have used Dragon at home but have been working with IBM at school, primarily to help one pupil with very poor reading/writing but strong verbal abilities. This opinion is about the use of the product as an educational aid and will ...  Read the complete review

Software that types for you! No more poking at the keyboard, no more typos, no more fuss! Not quite. We constantly see sci-fi films where people talk to computers, which then process information and respond verbally. Seems so simple, doesn't it? I mean, if computers can 'speak' to us, why can't we 'speak' to them? Unless you are fluent in binary like me ;) you have to resort to software which will process your speech into a set of audio signals, which can then be deciphered by the program. Programs usually do this with the help of a pre-programmed database, and some inituitive 'learning', which is exactly what ViaVoice does. The ...  Read the complete review

This piece of speech recognition software is simply appalling. I've been using it on and off for a few months now and it has never risen past the 'totally incoherent' level of recognition. I'm using the Mac version and I hope for your sake that the PC version is a lot better. Then again, a stone deaf person with no arms would be 'a lot better' at transcribing what you say. It registers that you have said something, then you hear loud noises of hard drive access coming from your computer for a few minutes, then totally wrong words appear on the screen, often barely recognizable as being anything like what you said. The manual reocmmends ...  Read the complete review

For those a bit confused about the title, they were the baddies in an 80's TV series called Battlestar Galactica. Their relevance to this product is that one of the gadgets in the series was a computer that typed out words on screen as it was being dictated to. I wanted one of those fantasy systems really bad at the time but knew it was just SciFi. Fast forward 20 years and, for the princely sum of £22, I now have the Galactica's computer sitting on my desk. Isn't technology amazing! ViaVoice V8 contains all you need to get started, including headset, tutorial video cd, 2 program cd's and an adaptor for IBM Thinkpad laptops. The latter ...  Read the complete review