Purveyors of the largest selection of speech recognition products worldwide
Posted by John Griffin on October 01, 1997 at 17:21:22:
Hi folks, (Note I've also posted this directly to Dragon support)
I'm John Griffin. My wife teaches L.D. classes at O.H. Schultz
elementary school in Mishicot Wis.
The are using power secretary to allow two students with disabilities (muscular dystrophy and Cerebral Palsy) to input information.
They've been stumped so they asked me to try to figure it out.
They have a new Mac Power PC to work with and Claris works. The Mac was bought to the Power Secretary specs so that seems to be ok.
I was able to load everything and get it to work but I have these
questions.
When I shut it down it occasionally locks or freezes up on me. I then have to turn off the computer but the next time I turn it on the computer tells me it's not happy that I didn't use normal exit systems.
Why is it freezing up on me? I can move the mouse but nothing works when clicked.
The second question concerns my input. I'm trying it with my voice first to be able to help the students, but even I have trouble.
It accepts about 60% of my words or phrases.
In setting up the training phase many times it the window pops up to ask me to say the same word three times in a row. But no matter how perfectly
I try to say the word or phrase it tells me it is not happy with my
pronounciation. So do I just cancel that word and go onto the next? -
Or I did find that I can change that window to just ask for 2 or even 1 instance. Of course with one instance it works every time. But what will that do for the long term use of the program?
Trying for 3 identical pronounciations was tough for me, it would be darn near impossible for the special ed students.
I'm a bit concerned that on a previous FAQ about my first queries for hints on using power secretary, one respondent told me that power secretary will be difficult to use. They suggested naturally speaking to be a much better product for these kids.
The problem for that is that the school is mostly set up with MACs not PC's.
You folks are the experts. Please tell me if Power Secretary will ever do the job for these kids. They have a tough enough job as it is. If it's going to be a long exercise in frustration with power secretary and they'd be better off with a PC and naturally speaking PLEASE let us know that!
Thanks for your help. I can understand that voice recognition is a complicated process. I hope we can make it work for these kids.
John Griffin