I need transcription software that works well in a meeting setting. In a related question (I'm a newbie to KB so I hope it's appropriate) I want to ask forum subscribers what digital recorder works best for making recordings that work best transcribing multi-voice recordings.

DNS 10.0

Windows XP professional version 2002 service pack three

computer: Pentium 4 CPU 3.2 gig .98 GB of RAM

DNS 10.0

Windows XP professional version 2002 service pack three

computer: Pentium 4 CPU 3.2 gig .98 GB of RAM

Lee,

Transcribing multi-voice recordings is not going to work for you.  First of all, most multi-voice recordings are more conversational speech than they are structured speech.  Speech recognition does not handle this very well at best and not at all at worst.  The latter is the rule rather than the exception.

Unless you create a user profile using the no training option and use that for transcription of these types of recordings, creating a digital voice recorder profile will not work at all.  The reason is simply that the DVR user profile is trained using either your voice or a voice other than the persons that will be speaking in your recordings.  This is one approach that you can, as we New Yorkers say, fagetaboutit !!!

One other significant problem in multi-voice recordings is that even if the speech is clear and reasonably structured (dictation verse is conversational) multiple speakers in a meeting situation generally don't wait for another person to finish before they start speaking.  So speakers that speak over top of another speaker are going to result in zero accuracy.  Add to this the conversational nature of most meetings and the prognosis of getting any kind of accuracy at all greater than about 5 to 15% is generally very poor.

The only way that this will work for you at all without costing you more time than it's worth in terms of poor transcription (accuracy) and the necessity to do more corrections than practical, is to do what's called "echo" dictating.  That is, record your meeting and then listen to the recording through an earphone or headphones and dictate your self while listening to the meeting.

Don't bother trying to record a meeting using a digital voice recorder.  You will be wasting your time and spinning your wheels.  Even with the speaker independent profile, what you want to do simply won't work.

Chuck Runquist
Former Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK & Senior Technical Solutions PM for DNS with Lernout & Hauspie (L&H)

"Life's Rule #1: Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend."  (Variant of Murphy's Law  -  Edward A. Murphy, Jr)

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