crowdsourcing

[wisdomeagle]

A friend on FB:

Does anyone know of any good, preferably free dictation software? I'm realizing that I may need it in the coming months.

I've heard dragon is good but it's $100 price tag is about $1500 past my budget right now. Thank you!
Someone in the comments also suggested Tazti Speech Recognition Software for Windows 7 and Vista

Comments

[alyse]

Hi! I'm disabled and use speech recognition software :D

Vista and Windows 7 have speech recognition software inbuilt, so if she has a recent windows machine, that's definitely an option. It's nowhere near as good as Dragon, but on the plus side, it's free. You can find out how to activate it and configure it by googling 'windows speech recognition'. It isn't offered on XP, so if she has an older Windows machine, that's unfortunately not an option.

Dragon have an iphone app that's also free (I think - I don't remember paying for it) so if she uses an iphone or ipad that might work.

Dragon is certainly in my experience the best, and can be installed on more than one machine (I've installed it on my desktop, my new desktop and my laptop, but I'm not sure if that's because I've got the same details or not). But it does mean that in theory she could try and pick up a copy from ebay. I don't know what it's like in the States, but a quick check over here shows that bidding starts at 99p, with a new version in the box starting at £6. So that's definitely an avenue worth exploring.

I got my version on one of the Amazon's lightning deals a couple of years ago (and upgraded it since), so that's also something she might watch out for over the next couple of weeks, especially as my understanding is that the Black Friday lightning deals in the States are so much better than they are over here. Nuance also offer discount codes (I got 20% off my upgrade thanks to that) and sometimes sites like Software for Students (which there must be a US equivalent) offer discounts (although the Nuance ones aren't that brilliant), but again they're really quite expensive even with that.

If she needs it for work, can she get work to pay for it? I know that they have to make 'reasonable adjustments' over here under the DDA, but I suspect the US is a bit behind in that respect. It might be another option, though.

ETA: Apparently Macs also have free inbuilt speech recognition software, so trying her OS first to see what comes bundled with it might be the best option.