In my quest to compare (and decide upon) appropriate voice recog. software
for an adolescent with LD - one who reportedly "always hated to write" and
"hated computers", I found an article in Popular Mechanics (june 98)
comparing IBM's ViaVoice Gold and DSNaturally Speaking Delux. My beef with
VR and the frustration I see with the students are (1) training time,
especially on the slow computers at most schools I visit - it's not so bad
with 133MHz and over with a Pentium II, but how many schools have this??
And, as the article said, 30 minutes (or more) to have these kids sit in one
place and speak into a little microphone is taxing...and (2) the need to
still proofread for word errors - not spelling errors that can be picked up
by the spellchecker - so the kid has to go back and carefully read the text
to make sure the right word was used - so I guess another whole teaching
lesson can be used here...and lastly (3) it is usually quicker to use the
keyboard for program navigation (mouse for "save", "open file") than the
voice commands.
The questions for this forum are:
(1) What has been your experience in working through some of these issues?
If you are training an aid or teacher to use VR with a student, what have
been your teaching strategies to work through some of these issues?
(2) Has anyone else compared ViaVoice with DDNS with their LD students?
(3) Given the training and time issues, what sort of support have you
set-up with the schools and students (I like Sharon's peer training idea
which I've used with other high tech devices) to justfiy the cost?
Thanks! Lisa Erwin-Miller
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