[kwlug-disc] Speech to text

[Paul Nijjar]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 10:58:19AM -0500, Kiwi Ssennyonjo wrote:
> 
> I have clients, doctors that need to find options.
> 

> They have all mentioned Dragon, and how they have not ha much luck
> with it.

I lurk on a list populated by doctors, and they use Dragon and a
medical version of Dragon. The medical version has a medical
vocabulary and thus may require less training. 

Unfortunately Dragon is the leader in this field. There is nothing in
the FLOSS world that compares. There is CMU Sphinx: 

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/

but it is no competition. (Since Dragon bought Macspeech I am not sure
there is even any real competition in the proprietary world!) You can
apparently make Dragon run in Ubuntu, but I think this is outside the
scope of the discussion: 

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19919

If you don't want to go with Dragon then your options are to use a
transcription service (which gets into big privacy concerns for
medical doctors if they are in the States), typing, or handwriting
recognition. Here is a thread about these options: 

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=24535787

Many of the people on this mailing list are open source zealots, so if
there was good competition for Dragon I am sure that the issue would
have come up. Unfortunately it has not. 

- Paul

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org