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We tested VoiceType and a competitor, Kurzweil VoicePad,, also about $70. Both come on CD-ROM (only for Windows computers with a sound card) and include a headset microphone.
To use either program, you must learn to pause between each word you say and to dictate punctuation. That forces you to speak so slowly that you may lose your train of thought. It also feels stilted. After you've mastered the talk, you can train the system to improve its accuracy with your voice, by reciting about 20 minutes' worth of set words and phrases to help the system create a phonetic database.
Your words spill onto the screen as you speak to IBM's VoiceType. As you continue speaking, VoiceType backtracks to correct itself, once it picks up more context and syntax-- to distinguish amoung "to", "two", and "too," for example. By contract, the VoicePad software seemed less sophisticated, often jumping the gun to guess words-- and getting them wrong.
On a 260-word passage chock-full of homophones, the VoiceType got 245 of the words right, for 94 percent accuracy; the VoicePad registered only 72 percent accuracy.
After several hours' use, VoiceType files occupied 32 megabytes (MB) of hard-disk space; the VoicePad files, about 20 MB.
VoiceType is clearly the superior voice-recognition program. It might help nontypists or people whose carpal-tunnel syndrome or arthritis makes typing painful. But it doesn't make for completely hands-free computing-- you must still use the keyboard and mouse to get the program running and correct its word choices.
© Consumer Reports
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