Linux Speech to Text

[Elizabeth McCarthy]

I'm looking for a software application for speech to text that will run on Linux similar to "DragonNS" which runs on Windows OS. It is for a student at our school who is physically handicapped. The school just switched over to a Linux server and I'm hoping there is something that will let her use speech to text in OpenOffice. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Mark Francillon]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_speech_recognition_software for some possibilities.

I'm not sure what role the 'server' in your description plays in this setup. Isn't the question just what software can run on the computer that's actually receiving the voice input from the student?


Mark

[Elizabeth McCarthy]

Yes, you are correct. I'm looking for speech to text software that would run on a Linux operating system?

[Elizabeth McCarthy]

Thanks, he sounds like the person I need to talk to. I'll email him today and mention Ning.

[Mark Francillon]

Right. My reading of the wikipedia article, and of a couple other things I glanced at, is basically (a) that you're not likely to find a native Linux app comparable to Dragon, at least not at this point; (b) that there are some 'virtualization'-based workarounds that might let you run Dragon inside Linux (the technique is analogous to what Parallels does on the Mac, if you're familiar with that--you run Windows apps inside of a copy of Windows magically running inside of OS X); and (c) that the workarounds are not entirely seamless (one of the places virtualization gets tricky is where you really have to deal with input/output devices, and speech recognition obviously involves dealing with audio input).


Mark