IBM VIAVOICE Standard v.10

I prefer Via Voice to Naturally Speaking. It is easy to use, has features to scan docs that I did in the past, and dictate words that are new. I find it works well and is easy to dictate to. It writes to both word and its own program, which can then be pasted into a doc. Tech support was also great! I have 3 copies I like it so much.

You don't get your money's worth with ViaVoice. At first, it seemed to work fine. Contrary to what the program is supposed to do, the more I used it, the worse it got. "Training" the software is extremely time consuming. However, I did this in hopes of improving its performance. Unfortunately, after spending all the time doing that, it was actually worse, not better. It has finally gotten so bad I cannot use the application at all. As I am dictating, it throws in random words which can't possibly have anything to do with what I am saying, some of them foreign. Dictate, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country," and you are likely to get "Avarice now is the Bois time for all good men to Gwendolyn." Help is impossible to find, and if you go to the IBM or ScanSoft site, you have to pay for it. Do not buy this software.

I am a little disappointed in the product. When I reboot my computer then the program will not reload. In order to use it I have to reinstall the program and then I can use it. In other words it will not work if I shut down the computer for the night.

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.

This program works better than I expected. I only took a short time to get my voice set up. I didn't clock it, so I might have taken more time than I thought, but I was enjoying the experience, so It was not difficult. If you have trouble typing and want a great program to help you easily produce text documents, You'll love this program.

This is a great item. It is fun to use. It works very well for me. It is easy enough to set up. Then with patience and doing a little reading to help program it you can use it quite efficiently. And it is easy to transfer to another place like wordpad or emails. I found that I could send longer emails to my mom because all I had to do is speak my thoughts out loud!!! If your words dont come through clearly just do a little reading again.

Was suppose to work on XP, could not get to download. Got warnig of incompatable. Not happy with this product

Maybe it was me, but I had no luck with this. My thought was that maybe a more expensive version would have worked.