Version 11.5 was not much better but version 12 was a very considerable improvement in stability and accuracy. The problem started with version 11 which was quite unstable.

I went through the various upgrades, each with improved results as far as voice recognition was concerned, but Nuance made installation rather user unfriendly and their support was very poor (and still is). Upgrades in the software were rather sporadic in quality at this time, because they initially sold the company to a Belgian outfit who in turn sold it to another company who sold it to a subsidiary of Nuance. This made the use of keyboards very difficult and I relied on Dragon NaturallySpeaking, as it had become, for much of my general computer use, including on forums. It was not as accurate as the IBM system but still quite good.ĭisaster struck me in 2002, in that I had a couple of small strokes which left my right hand considerably less mobile (and it still is less mobile). I can't remember which version I started with, possibly 5 or 6. I therefore switched to Dragon for PC, produced by Dragon Systems. However, its speed and ease of use were a lot better.Ī few years later, IBM dropped many of its software products to concentrate on its core business and voice recognition disappeared from its product list (although I believe that they still give product support on it). The accuracy was slightly poorer than with ViaVoice because the algorithms could not always separate the words correctly.

ViaVoice was quite a remarkable program.Ībout 1995, I switched to IBM Simply Speaking Golden which allowed one to use continuous speech, without pausing between words. This means that each word had to be dictated separately with a pause of about 1/5 of a second between each one. At the time, ViaVoice and a couple of other programs that were available used the discrete technique. I bought this because I am not the world's best typist and I was producing numbers of long reports for various organisations, as well as technical papers. In the early 1990s, I dabbled with voice recognition with the IBM ViaVoice. Topic: Voice recognition, dictation into computers Posted By: devil View The Full Original Topic: Voice recognition, dictation into computers Join our free community to post questions, replies or to see the full features of the forum. This is a text archive version of our main content.

Nuance ibm viavoice