Any suggestions for voice recognition software?

A friend of mine lost a finger while doing some home repairs. Now he wants to know about voice recognition software for his PC. Does anyone have any knowledege they'd be willing to share?

Dragon Naturally Speaking is one of the lead products in this market. Not cheap, though. If your friend is in the US, then he may get help paying for the program through the government. It's worth looking into.

There are plenty of other software programs. Just do a Google search for 'voice recognition software'.

I can tell you the Dragon program works well enough, but you do have to spend some time training it. A lot depends on what you want to do. If you are doing a novel, then it's good, depending on your disability. If it's just surfing and occasional email writing, it may be overkill. My brother types with one arm. It's slow, but it works. If he were doing extensive writing, then the Dragon program or similar might be a better solution.

Philips free speech (not free) , runs rings around dragon natural speaking ... requires less voice training , and understands user accents better .

Of course the product has moved on now , and is divided into two groups ... legal / medical , available world wide

Not forgeting this one for linux , still things to do , but getting there ...

http://freespeech.sourceforge.net/

and more info here

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Speech-Recognition-HOWTO/software.html

And out of curiosity , someone's general comparison ... now well outdated ... that's why I hate the internet ... old rubbish clogs up the works , making it harder for newbies to find relevant information .

http://www.io.com/~hcexres/textbook/recomx7c.html

Thanks for the suggestions. Is there some kind of hardware that would make his life easier?

Not that I have seen , hardware wise ... but ... another human being sitting at the pc doing the typing while they dictate .

But then you'd have to feed them .

There are text to speech type tool's ... just havent seen work on recordings being transcoded automatically which is the reverse ... unfortunately the pc still need's to learn the speech patern's of the operator to beable to generate accurate result's ... even then you need to check what it has decided to write ... spelling mistake's .

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I remember a typing tool called marios typing ... yes that character ... simple and easy to follow ... it's how I went from 2 fingers to 6 finger typing in less then 2 months ... even then I surprise people at how fast I can type with only 2 fingers and be 99% accurate .

Now with 6 , it just a blurr and the smell of burning plastic as the keyboard fire's up .

Check for a pm .

Thanks again.