Some background..

I am going to attempt to figure out the different voice recognition programs that are most often used for students who have difficulty with the writing process. It can be a bit overwhelming trying to decide which program to use with a particular student and I hope to sort out some of the differences between programs. Since I am supposed to be one of the assistive technology "experts" in our district, I think that it is about time that I jumped into the topic of voice recognition. I have only used voice recognition software with one student so far in my practice as a school physical therapist and that was quite some time ago. About six years ago, I attempted to teach a 6th grade student with muscular dystrophy how to use Via Voice which I purchased for less than $20 on a clearance rack (it must have been the earliest version). The only computer available was the teacher's computer (desktop) so we worked on training the computer to recognize his voice right there in the classroom--not an optimal situation. Our sessions were at the end of the day and his voice tended to be very soft because of fatigue. The fact that the classroom was quite noisy did not help much. Needless to say, we were not very effective in training the computer although we did get to the point where he could get the computer to type about a paragraph but we had to do so much editing that it hardly seemed worth it. We usually spent a lot of time trying to resist the urge to laugh out loud at some of the errors made by the computer--frustrating and hilarious at the same time. Thankfully, this student is now a successful user of Dragon Naturally Speaking thanks to another therapist in the district who worked on voice recognition with him in high school.