Use with telephone?

[Terry Davidson]

I'd like to know if it's possible to use Dragon Naturally Speaking to recognize and display, on a PC, voice communication from a standard telephone using direct feed from the telephone to the input of the PC's audio card.

The reason I ask this is because my aged mother has grown profoundly deaf and can't use a telephone anymore because of it, although she speaks quite normally. It would be great if she could just flip on her computer when making a phone call and have the speech displayed as text.

I know that the audio bandwidth of the telephone is pretty narrow, and, after reading how inferior microphones give inferior results with this type of software, I have doubts that the software would be effective.

What do you think?

[Suntzu]

I think its possible. But i dont know what the accuracy would be like. Theres a LOT of variables.

You need to inteface the phone and split the incoming signal into the PC and the telephone. This is possible.

You need to have the dragon setup and ON at all time when you ring. I would use remote PC management software to do this.

You need to DICTATE not just have a chat. She needs to be able to see the screen.

So it could be done but is tricky to set up and maintain. Possibly to hard and too expensive.

If it were me I would just set up a Laptop near her phone, connected to the internet and remotle bring up a word document with 26 point font and type your questions and have her read this......

hang on.....then what you could do is use dragon on your PC at home, activate your remote desktop on your and her PC and just dictate into the remote desktop window on your PC, it would then appear on her screen almost immediately.

You dont need to split the phone line, in fact you dont need to do much at all. You can even edit what you say before pasting in the remote viewing software. I think theres a few free remote desktop applications available. You ve just got to get her a computer and a basic internet connection.

This is the best solution in my opinion.

Hope ive helped.

[Terry Davidson]

Thanks Suntzu, you've given me some ideas.