posted 26 February 2001 14:33
Hi Phil and everyone,Personally, I adore my voice recognition software! 
It took about 15 minutes to set up initially, with the hardware installation, software installation and a minimal training session. And it works fairly well. With a longer training session it'd be better, I think, but it also "learns" as you go, so the more you use it, the better it gets.
Note I said "fairly" above, though. I have noticed the odd problem or two because it crashes every now and again, normally after I've been working with it for a couple of hours. Although in general it's pretty reliable as long as you don't have a lot of TSR stuff hanging around.
But on the whole the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. I use it only for transferring words to PC, not for formatting or anything clever. 
This is because I find it a lot quicker to do my own formatting rather than waiting for the software to work it out.
That said, I don't think I'd much want to mess around with this kind of thing if I were busy - but if you have a morning free or something it's certainly something worth considering. I can dictate a couple of thousand words an hour, and although it does inevitably take longer to correct dictated text, there's still a very significant saving in terms of time. Of course, you need to know your subject well to really benefit from it - you lose more than you gain if you have to stop every second word to look something up!
quote:
Is this considered the next step for translators after using other translation related software, or is it the first step for getting into using software to boost your output? 
Difficult one to answer, really. I'm not convinced yet (for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with here) that it works well in conjunction with Trados or any of the other Word-enabled CAT packages, but used on its own, it's pretty good.
If I had to choose whether to buy either voice recognition or CAT software, I think on balance I'd buy the CAT software first because it allows you to keep old work and reuse it (somewhat oversimplified, but that's the gist of it!!). But the voice recognition software would be a very close second. It's certainly a means of giving productivity a boost if you use it properly.
quote:
I suppose what I really would like to know, is whether translators think this type of software is a tool or a toy? 
It depends how much work you get in on the fax. 
For overtyping files, CAT would be my first choice every time. But for working from hard copy only, where there's a lot of running text and it's a subject you know well, then voice recognition is very handy indeed! 
Any other views?
All the best
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apollo@translatortips.net
posted 26 February 2001 12:51
posted 26 February 2001 14:33
