Author Topic: Free voice to text software?  (Read 1466 times)

shelivesthedream

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 6744
  • Location: London, UK
Free voice to text software?
« on: May 21, 2018, 11:52:44 AM »
I'm trapped under a feeding or sleeping baby most of the day at the moment but am beginning to yearn to DO something with myself again. I've dabbled in bits of writing before and thought it would be a nice, low-key way to occupy myself from time to time during maternity leave, but actually operating a physical keyboard seems pretty ambitious at present.

Is there any decent voice-to-text software I could download so I could dictate instead? Obviously I'm not expecting the world if it's free, so I'd be happy with minimal punctuation and the like, but I would like something that will do an OK job of working out what words I'm saying most of the time without having to put a lot of effort into setting it up (bonus points if it can be switched on and off by voice so I can turn my attention to a crying baby without it trying to transcribe "Waah! Waah! Waaaaaaaaah!") If it makes a difference, I have a British RP-type accent.

sokoloff

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1191
Re: Free voice to text software?
« Reply #1 on: May 21, 2018, 12:19:37 PM »
I would look towards Amazon Transcribe. Either directly, or via some developer who built a slick UI on top of it.

It's not perfectly free, but it's super-cheap (and pay-per-minute) $0.0004 per second ($1.44/hr) and 60 minutes free per month for the first 12 months of usage.
« Last Edit: May 21, 2018, 12:22:07 PM by sokoloff »

Lulee

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 252
  • Location: NH
  • "We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it."
Re: Free voice to text software?
« Reply #2 on: May 24, 2018, 11:12:06 AM »
You may already have something on your PC/Mac/phone that would work. My Windows 7 has something called Speech Recognition which could integrate with some of their apps.  I don't have Word on my PC but I suspect I could get it to work with Word Pad to dictate basic text that could then be cleaned up later.

Sometimes this functionality is folded into features to support people with disabilities who struggle with standard keyboards.  So your word processing software may have it in-built for that reason.

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!