Hi All

My first experience of using voice recognition technology was in the early 1990s when I started using Kurzweil Voice following my seeing a demonstration at a computer exhibition.

As I had recently changed careers that involved the production of numerous reports using a tape cassette dictaphone for transcription by a typist using a then "state-of-the-art" word-processing machine, I saw the advantage of using a voice recognition program for the production of reports and other documents.

Kurswiel Voice was only able to recognise one word at a time but with practice, one could eventually dictate reasonably well.

Then Lernout and Hauspie's Voice Xpress marketed by ScanSoft came along and dramatically improved the use of voice recognition for the production of reports and other documents. This continued until the demise of Lernout and Hauspie, when ScanSoft took over Dragon and I switched to Dragon preferred around 2005. (ScanSoft subsequently became Nuance Communications)

During 2005, I became aware of KnowBrainer and then the KnowBrainer forum website. This forum website continued until the end of September 2006 when, on or about October the first 2006, the current forum website came into being.

During the early formative period of Dragon and KnowBrainer, the original KnowBrainer Forum assisted me considerably in improving my skills via contributions from other Forum members and from Lunis. I would therefore like to thank all those and Lunis for their input during this period as it has stood me in good stead for the future up to now and hopefully, I was able to give something back during this period by my contributions to the current Forum.

Since retiring at the beginning of 2011, my use of Dragon, KnowBrainer and other voice recognition utilities has declined to the extent that I hardly ever use voice recognition anymore and with the advances in technology I can see that any further updates to my voice recognition software will be of little use. This does not mean that I won't look at the Forum from time to time merely out of interest but I think it is time for me to hang up my microphone. I would add that my current computer and microphone set up (Jabra GN 9350) has been working for me since 2009.

Finally in closing, I wish everything of the best to everybody who contribute to the Forum and give of their time to help others in the use of voice recognition technology. No doubt, with the takeover of Nuance Communications by Microsoft, things will certainly change in the future.

Jomark

Jomark

DPI 15.61, KB2017, SpeechStart+, MS Office 2019 Professional, Windows 10 Pro