Can Voice Recognition Software Help Your Healthy Computing?

Voice Recognition (also referred to as speech recognition) software enables you to dictate text, or give commands to your computer via a microphone.

At first glance, voice recognition seems to be an easier, more relaxing way of operating your computer. You hardly need to use anything except your voice. No typing! Less eyestrain!

So why aren’t we all using voice recognition on our computers now, and would it be healthier for us if we did? You guessed it, there are a number of drawbacks…

Extra Expense.

With the exception of a few open source items like Berkeley’s CMU Spinx, you will find most of the so called free voice recognition software is usually shareware or ‘lite’ or trial versions.

Microsoft is providing improved free speech recognition software as part of Vista, but it does appear that if you want the best speech recognition programs, you will have to pay for them,

You’re talking between $100-200 for Dragon NaturallySpeaking (for newer Windows PCs), $50 for IBM ViaVoice 10 (older Windows PCs) or $180 for iListen (for Apple Macs). This does NOT include costs of accessories or upgrades.

Low Speed

A good typist at 130 words per minute(wpm) and 90% accuracy, can outperform someone using a voice recognition system. Youll struggle mentally to dictate at more than 50 wpm anyway!

Need For Careful Pronunciation

You must still clearly pronounce words to ensure high accuracy (which for a long document could get to be annoying.)

Its also tiring and a strain on your throat to dictate for long periods. Anything that affects your voice could affect the response and accuracy of the software, so you’d be back typing, if you had larangytis.

A Learning Curve

You must learn how to use the software, and it must gradually learn your voice,and new words not in its memory. This will take what is non productive time, and can cause stress (also see below).

Variable Accuracy

After training, a good speech recognition system under normal working working conditions can correctly convert speech to text between 96% and 99% accuracy, but your voice type and way you speak can make this a lot lower. And repetition causes stress and wasted computer time. This could be made worse by…

Noise Pollution

Would you want to be sharing a workspace with other people incessantly chattering into their PCS? Irritating, or distractive or what?

In addition, even if you wear even a high quality voice recognition headset for a few hours, your ears are likely feel hot and tender afterwards. In addition voice recognition technology tends to trap you in one position, which is not at all good for your body for any long period of time.

Poor Range/Flexibility

Big one. Ideally, you should have speech recognition software that will recognise you installed on all computers. Networked voice recognition software is generally at the stage of recognizing simple commands from a wide variety of users, as in the phone voice recognition you find when you call up automated telephone switchboards.

You can install a voice recognition system on your laptop, or on a few desktops, but you’ll problem run into another problem, which is …

Loss Of Computing Power.

Voice recognition software takes a lot of processing power and can slow your computer down appreciably.

Maybe this may not be apparent if youre lucky enough to have a top of the range desktop but if you use a laptop or old pc you may suffer freezes, glitches and crashes, especially with the latest most memory- hungry computer voice recognition.

For most people at the moment, you can see that voice recognition software isn’t the ideal healthy computing solution. But with the increasing demand for smaller more portable computing options, who knows what the future may bring?