Best speak to text and text to speak program

[witch]

I have been asked to look for a program that provides what the SEN dept want as follows:

"We need to have the ability to use speak to text and a text speak resource."

 

Can anyone advise me of a good program? They want one with a "human" sounding voice

[3s-gtech]

Dragon Naturally Speaking does this both ways. Don’t know how good the latest versions are, but it has a well established decent reputation. It’s not cheap!

[witch]

Thanks - we used it in our old school and the issue with it then was the huge amount of setup needed to get it working at all

[simpsonj]

To potentially save a bit of money, have they tried the dictation / reading aloud that's inbuilt into Office 2019?

 

I believe Google also has an equivalent in G-Suite.

[Rob_D]

We use Claroread for text to speech. It all works well and they have a load of downloadable voices you can add in at no extra cost (in the pro version). However, it doesn't do speech to text (at least the version we've got doesn't).

 

Personally, I've had pretty good results with the MS office built-in tools, which are further enhanced in 2019 or Office 365 versions.

[witch]

We have Office 2016 - seems to work well for me so I will tell her. Not quite sure what she wants to do with it so other options very welcome

[DalekSec]

We use DocsPlus for text to Speech and Office Dictate for Speech to Text

[mrstrong]

google docs voice typing:

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/4492226?hl=en

 

Also I think all OS have some form of Text-to-Speech built in these days.

[mavhc]

Given free online Word and GDocs both do dictation not much need to pay any more.

 

And https://www.onenote.com/learningtools is free too. And Chrome/ChromeOS has https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7031755?hl=en Installing ChromeVox in Google Chrome on Windows and Mac OS

[dhicks]

"We need to have the ability to use speak to text and a text speak resource."

 

Is this for people with difficulty seeing, or for dyslexia support? The solutions used seem to be different - this page, although a couple of years old now, would seem to give a reasonable summary to start with:

 

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/01/results-of-the-2016-gov-uk-assistive-technology-survey/

 

The top "screen reader" would seem to be JAWS, while the top "reading solution" would seem to be TextHelp's Read & Write. The latter is for dyslexia support - we've just purchased a school-wide license (which includes all users and workstations, including ChromeOS if I remember correctly) for around £1,000. The top speech-to-text solution is Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is the speech engine used for Siri (or at least it was, I don't know if the two products still share any resources).

[mavhc]

https://www.nvaccess.org/ for screen reading

[witch]

Right

I now have a clearer picture of what they want in this instance

It is definitely a speech to text solution for poor writers.

I see Office Dictate is an option.

Now I know what they want - any other suggestions?

[mavhc]

Looks like you need 365 for Dictate: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/dictate/

 

I'd go with using Voice Typing in Google Docs

[witch]

Not a google school though, I got it working with 365 on one computer - sadly not the one that needs it

[abaxter2]

Not a google school though, I got it working with 365 on one computer - sadly not the one that needs it [/quote @witch what issues are you facing with dictate in office 365? The add on from Microsoft garage is no longer available for download as built into office 365 - if using the downloaded version from Microsoft garage this will no longer work. The version built into office 365 clients and word online etc needs proxy bypass rules added to run smoothly (if you use a proxy to connect to the internet). I'm not sure if this is available in office 2016 / 2019 but is definitely available and works (with proxy bypass rules) in office 365. If you need the list of proxy bypass rules for dictate just let me know.

[witch]

Seems to be working OK this morning...