I should've mentioned that which transcription software is best depends on what you are doing. If you are transcribing your own voice, then DragonNS might be OK. But if you are transcribing another person's talk, or that of a whole group, the utility of DragonNS becomes questionable at best, because Dragon must be trained to the voice(s) it is transcribing before it can be used, and it is rarely the case that you can get someone other than yourself to take the time to complete the initial training, much less stick around to make corrections during the transcription process. So, if you want to automate transcription of other people's talk, you usually have to recreate other people's talk in your own voice (i.e., listen to what they say through headphones and then repeat it into the microphone of another recording device), and then train the software to your voice. And then you have to contend with the fact that, though Dragon is probably the best voice recognition software out there, it's not very good even on a single voice. I found that you have to talk very slowly, at an unnaturally steady pace to get it to work at all, and even then I had a lot of corrections to make. Just transcribing on my own was at least as fast if not faster. From the forums I looked at a couple years ago, it seemed like my experience was typical, and it seemed that most of the folks who used DragonNS, ViaVoice, etc. were folks who couldn't manipulate a keyboard or folks like lawyers and salespeople who used it to transcribe brief memos they recorded while in the car or hunched over documents. I should also mention that an alternative to transcribing on your own is paying a service to do so. I think that standard rates for this, and related topics have been discussed on either the qualsoft list or the languse email lists, both of which are good resources for questions about transcription. Of course, if you have someone else transcribe, you'll still have to review the transcription for accuracy to the recordings, etc. Finally, here are a couple sites with a lot of language analysis (including transcription) software. descriptions and reviews: http://www.qualitativeresearch.uga.edu/QualPage/qda.html http://www.textanalysis.info/ Best, Christian Nelson On Mar 3, 2006, at 8:11 AM, Isabel Alvarez wrote:
I would like to have any information concerning transcription software. I know the existence of DRAGON professional, but I haven't use it. Any thoughts? Thank you so much. Isabel
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