Devices for speech-to-text for child with learning disabilities

August 25, 2013 3:49 PM

I am looking for a device that will do speech recognition (speech to text) at home for my son. He is a great writer, as in storyteller, and creates great stories every day (ten pages single spaced when I transcribe them) but his handwriting speed is about two or three words per minute. What would be most convenient is if an Android tablet (e.g. Nexus 7) will do the trick, because that is the first choice for some other purposes. Is there any reason that this would be a poor choice -- is there something that is far better?

We understand that the device will need to be trained and he's willing to put in the effort.

posted by winston to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

A Nexus 7 would be perfect, IMO. I didn't do any voice training with it and I write blog posts with it. Jellybean has great voice recognition. If you're going to use it for something else, I say go for it.
posted by kathrynm at 4:15 PM on August 25, 2013

hmmm...you might just get an android phone for this. I have the Galaxy Note 2 (still kind of a high-end phone) and am always pretty gob-smacked at how good the voice recognition is without any training at all. I mostly have used it only in texting and for google now (google's version of siri) and it always seems to do the trick, even getting tricky homonyms with context clues 9 times out of ten. The future really is now. And the nexus 7 is even newer. Probably the best choice (unless you wanted to invest more for the nexus 10).
I haven't tried the voice recognition for any word-processing tho, but it should work just as well. As near as I can tell it's built into the Android OS, not any particular app. Every time you pull up the keyboard there's a button for voice input as well.
posted by sexyrobot at 4:18 PM on August 25, 2013

What age is he? We used Dragon a while & shunted him into touch typing which has helped somewhat.
posted by tilde at 5:37 PM on August 25, 2013

Response by poster: He's nine.
posted by winston at 6:09 PM on August 25, 2013

Yes, that's about the age we started. Got a typing game, set up a rewards system for spending 20 min blocks on impoving typing. School year hasn't started yet so I'm not sure how it will fit into the educational plan.
posted by tilde at 6:24 AM on August 26, 2013

I learned touch typing at that age, using Mavis Beacon (there might be something better out there by now but it worked well for me). It's a skill that he needs to try to learn anyways eventually so even if you start using voice recognition it's worth trying.

I've used the native voice recognition in Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean, and Windows 7, and they are all okay, not really superb. I also use Dragon and it's much, much better. It's Mac or PC only but if you have the Professional version there is an Android app also. Dragon will go through your emails and documents to learn your writing style, and training it is very simple (you just read some things aloud and then remember to correct it when you make mistakes while writing later). The learning curve is moderate, depending on what you want to do, but the support materials are good. I could rhapsodize but it is definitely worth it.
posted by epanalepsis at 9:55 AM on August 26, 2013

Response by poster: He is also learning touch typing.
posted by winston at 5:33 AM on August 27, 2013