Bill, may we go ahead and use this thread to discuss voice recognition software already available?  I mean, that sure is what I thought the thread title was referring to.  "Survey" should have been in the title to make the purpose of the OP clear, but it is now what it is, so maybe we can use it to launch a discussion?

Or is there another thread around here where the discussion has been going for a bit?

And I'm asking you, Bill, because you seem to be the ranking member thus far in the thread.

Except that rank is weird, if it is intended to use the vocabulary "most" because there seems to be a lot of mosts around these parts and each new most reduces the value of the mosts that came before.  But sliding off-topic, yes?  Best stop with that line of thought.

EDIT:  Just looked at DOC-2327 and see that "most" is part of that rank.  So I want to know who is the mostest?

I've contributed my piece up above. 

But Bill brings up good examples of why speech recognition needs to be exceptional.

One day we will have computer systems that are utterly and completely better and listening and speaking than even the best of us.  For now, we still have cars that do the wrong things half the time, regardless of what commercials show.  God help us when someone inadvertently/prematurely wires something physically important to a computer that can be controlled by voice (thinking along the lines of "Blue Screen Of Death" taking on a whole new meaning).

-Noel

Thank you for the response, Bill.  I haven't exactly been Cpt. Quick myself here in responding.  Everybody's busy, right?

Anyway, I am very interested to find out what voice recognition product is worth buying or trying.  Maybe even a good freeware product.

I installed, with some difficulty, the Microsoft product that is availbale for Vista Ultimate, and it's just not going to make the grade.  I worked very hard at "teaching" it the bla-bla-bla that was being asked of me by the M_soft engineers that made that product and it's just way too buggy.

I even started testing it just for research purposes and could trick it into writing what I wanted, but it was way too much trouble.

What I am looking for is a product that I can create memorandums with.  In other words, I talk and the nice voice recognition software gets most of what I say into a text format and then I can go through it and edit what needs editing.

I don't expect it to be perfect.  Far from it.  But I don't want to have to be spending all my time choosing this or that word or letter or number etc.  I just want to talk in a nice smooth manner and in a very clear voice, which I can easily do, and the nice software gets even just 70% of what I say without constantly bugging me for input as I am talking.

Of course, what I am asking here may be beyond any software out there right now.  But that's whay I asked if we could discuss this business in this thread.

AND this was not generated by a voice recognition system! 

In fact, it is generated by two fingers that really need to wear glasses, but they refuse to.  They are constantly making mistakes to make me look bad.

I did not read all the replies (time), but I will say a few years back we were doing a chapter on this topic in a book on game design.  After talking to large game companies like EA and Blizzard, they recommended AT&T technology at that time.

WES BECKWITH