Speech to text software

My wbusineess requires that she types up large amounts on information from dictaphones. Is there an effective speech to text software platform that will make this easier?
Thanks.

I think a friend of mine uses something called Dragon. I’ve never seen it but he seems pretty please with it.

I think recent versions of Microsoft Office have something built-in but I’m not convinced they are by any means perfect.

Another option are the online transcription services that use “real” people, via a website and uploaded mp3 files, to do the work.

Rachel

I’ve never seen anything except people that does a useful job off a dictaphone. Dragon and the like work for trained users as long as you are correcting errors, I don’t think they work on recordings, at least didn’t last time I played.

Transcription services apparently are very varied in their goodness and price, I know some people have got fantastic results, others who’ve got garbage obviously not written by a native English speaker.

She is an inventory clerk so it’s long lists of housey related stuff on dictaphone that then needs to become a document. Quite labour intensive on the typing currently.

Will investigate these options thanks however any other good ideas gratefully received.

Been looking at this for educational purposes.

Windows Vista/7 stuff has come on in leaps and bounds since XP – needs a bit of user time to train it though.

Dragon by Nuance is the market leader. They bought MacSpeech and now charge accordingly.

ipadio[/url] is pretty good, turns a phonecall into an mp3 and SpinVox transcribes the first minute for free. Not looked at paid models, but think they were recently bought by Nuance too. They use an algorithm for the donkey work, then I suspect the bits it doesn’t understand go through an Indian call centre. It’s good enough that I use it with my esol learners.

It’s got apps for iphone and android if that helps.