10Jan
Can I record my university lecturers voice and have Dragon transcribe it automatically?
Today’s Question:
Hello,I’m after a voice to text software package that I can use for recording university lectures.
The purpose is to capture everything that the lecturer presents and discusses for a 4 hour period and thus eliminate my need to take notes. Looking at your website and tutorials on YouTube, it appears that your technology offering requires a personal microphone mounted within centimeters of the person speaking plus it also requires a test vocal speech to understand that person correctly and therefore would not be suitable for this application.
Do you offer anything that may suit my needs?
Regards,
A.P
Australia
Answer:
Thanks for the excellent question. I hear this one quite a bit.
It would be great if it was that simple, but speech recognition technology hasn’t reached that stage as yet.
Dragon is not transcription software. The program will recognise only one, trained, speakers voice but not a meeting or an interview involving multiple speakers. Nor will it recognize an unknown speaker from someone who has not trained on the software. i.e. old audio recordings of someone’s voice or a university lecturer, as the speaker hasn’t trained and the audio may not be clear enough. You can use a quality digital recorder though to record your own voice for Dragon and have transcribed very efficiently.
In the example you have given the user is lecturer is not dictating, hasn’t trained and you are unlikely to get a consistent audio recording.
It’s in my interest to sell it to you, so take my word for it when I say it’s unlikely to be accurate enough.
That being said, if you can ask your lecturer to train on the software and get him to wear a close microphone with a high quality voice recorder you might get decent results, there’s just no way to be sure. You will need to be prepared to do some editing too.
I’m going to use your question on my blog if it’s OK with you. I won’t identify you in any way. Other people are interested in this topic.
Best of luck
Voice Recognition Australia