voice memos speech recognition / transcription

Posted by Hugh
Jan 4, 2015 at 06:37 PM

As far as I know, a solution to meet your exact requirements doesn’t exist (yet). You could probably get near to them using Siri on an iDevice, or its equivalent on Android (I’m sorry, I’m unfamiliar with the Android platform). I gather from your post that it’s the surrounding procedures rather more than the dictation technology itself that you’re - understandably - finding frustrating. To reduce the button-pushing on an iDevice, personally I’d use Launch Center Pro, into which keyboard shortcuts can be programmed under iOS8, plus Nuance’s Dragon Dictation app (which I’ve found to be more accurate than Siri - although see below), plus email, again pre-programmed. As you’re probably aware, Nuance is the big dog in this market, with - probably - the most advanced technology and in my experience improving results - and to the best of my knowledge, others, including Apple and Microsoft, license their software, including Siri, from Nuance - Google I don’t know.

(There is reason for optimism. According to this weekend’s newspapers, AI research is starting to make some progress after a period of years when results did not match expectations. And one area in which strides are being made by several Silicon Valley enterprises is pattern recognition, including voice recognition. Possibly it isn’t too much to hope that dictation/voice-to-text and voice control of software will become ubiquitous, easy-to-use and still more precise before very long?)