I have given ViaVoice a middle rating that I will explain. About a dozen years ago I began to have some difficulty with my hands and for some time stopped playing the violin and became concerned about my ability to type. In a computer store I saw a special deal on ViaVoice, $30 with a $20 rebate. I have a Mac, but my wife had a PC, so I thought for $10 it's worth trying it on her PC. I was surprised at how well it worked, permitting dictation into SpeakPad or Word. However, my wife objected to having it on her computer because it delayed firing it up, and she gave the program to a relative. A few years ago ViaVoice became available for the Mac, and I purchased it for $140. But it never worked as well as the version I had on the PC, and in fact became very unreliable, freezing up just when I thought it was starting to work well. When I complained, Apple conceded that it did not work well, but had no remedy. About a year ago, Dragon NaturallySpeaking became available for the Macintosh, and since I had recently upgraded my iMac, I was assured it would work for me. Having paid my two hundred dollars I put it in my machine only to be informed that my computer would not handle it. Back at the Apple Store, after some head scratching, I was informed that my machine did not have the required Intel chip and my money was refunded.
I decided to get a used PC dedicated to ViaVoice. From Amazon I bought for $50 an in- the-box ViaVoice and my next-door neighbor gave me a PC that her son was going to discard. It all works quite well.
If you are looking for a voice recognition system that you can talk to and expect it to write without your need looking back, forget it. But if your expectations are somewhat less, and you exercise some patience, it will save you a lot of time and thousands of keystrokes. Its vocabulary will sometimes surprise you, both in what it knows, and what it does not. Writing up a log of a Latin-American trip I took a few years ago, it immediately came up with Santiago, Puerto Montt, Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, but took several repetitions to get Ushuaia, which is not surprising because everyone has a different pronunciation for that name. More frustrating was its difficulty in getting my pronunciation of penguin (It now has it.) A real surprise was it's instant recognition of the word shillelagh, a word I had never seen in print and had no idea of how to spell. It also came up instantly with a 13 letter not very common family name. Single syllable words are the most common problem.
The correction window is indispensable, because among the as many as eight choices, your chances of finding what you said are very good. So, don't get too far ahead, look back every couple of sentences.
It's far from perfect, but useful and even entertaining.
Steven L. Harrison
Vern Fisher
PDX Bill