I was doing a search for the Buddy G7 pod external USB sound card.  When I did a search for Buddy G7, nothing came up.  When I did a search for Buddy I got all kinds of Buddy results for November of 2010 but no Buddy G7.  I later discovered that in the main NaturallySpeaking Speech Recognition forum page, someone had posted a question about the Buddy G7 on 2/11/2011, which never showed up in my search results.

Cafe,

The product is the Buddy USB 7G rather than G7 which may account for your not finding information.  The Buddy 7G Audio Adapter has been under test by a number of speech recognition VARs but has only just been generally released by the developer (InSync Speech Technologies).  We, for example, in the UK expect our first delivery today.

For details of the 7G technology see http://www.insyncspeech.com/c-8-usb-adapters.aspx

Graham

 

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www.itspeaking.co.uk

We found a number of references when googling for the “Buddy 7G” but you should additionally know that we are in the process of recalling this product. It's an absolutely stunning soundcard but is not quite ready for prime time and unfortunately, we did not catch the problems in the 1st hour of testing because they didn't show up until the 2nd hour, after our office computer crapped out and we had to switch to our backup system. For some people, the Buddy 7G fails to work immediately while for others, it may work fine for an hour or 2 and then cease to function. We also tried setting the sampling rate down to 11.025 kHz which, interestingly enough, worked for a couple of hours or so but eventually seized up again.

InSync, the manufacturers of the Buddy 7G, have several people working on a solution 24/7 and we hope to have these problems resolved soon. The manufacturer believes that the problem only requires a firmware update. As a precaution, we have disabled sales of this item on our website. We feel fairly certain that it's a temporary issue but for the present, we cannot recommend purchasing the Buddy 7G.

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have the problems with Buddy 7 been resolved?  If or when they are resolved, is it the best sound card available to get the best accuracy?

InSync has invested a significant amount of R&D in the Buddy 7G and a few weeks ago, we tested a second-generation model that included 22.05 kHz sampling rate and was 20 MHz faster. We tested 2 units which performed admirably well for about 1.5 hours on several test computers with numerous test microphones but from anywhere between 1.5 hours and 4 hours, the soundcards would begin by dropping words, misrecognizing text and eventually would fail completely. The only way we could keep the 2 soundcards working is by swapping them out. Sometimes we could switch to a different USB port and sometimes we would have to reboot but obviously the technology isn't quite ready for speech recognition use. All that we can tell you is that the manufacturer is concerned and motivated but at this point, they don't have an ETA on a solution. If and when the problem is resolved, we will post our test results and make it available to the public. Note that only the Buddy 7G soundcard appears to be suffering from this issue. We have not heard any complaints from other Buddy 7G products such as the Buddy Desktop or Buddy StylusMic microphones.

In the meantime, SpeechWare is working on a frequency limiting version of their USB soundcard. It's not the same technology used by InSync but preliminary testing looks promising.

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