IBM ViaVoice Pro USB Edition

I, unfortunately, was trying to use Internet Explorer, and the support was less than stellar. The voice command "surf the web" did launch it and the "home", "back", and "forward" commands worked well to do the obvious. But the undocumented commands became key to navigation. To tab from one field or link to the next, you say "next field". "Previous field" is like a shift-tab to go backwards. "next line" and "previous line" seem to be equivalent to the down and up arrows.

The microphone included with this package is the Andrea NC-61 along with the Andrea USB pod, which is a half of a sound card (microphone side only) that connects through your USB port. I found the quality of the pod to be excellent. Andrea advertises the NC-61 headset as using noise cancelling technology, but I found this microphone to not even be directional, and pretty much useless in any environment in which anyone else was speaking, however softly, in the same room. I did purchase separately an Andrea ANC-750 microphone and the noise cancelling on that microphone was quite good. (note: there is some white noise in the background that is audible if you use the ANC-750 to make a recording, but this should be ignored, as it is part of the noise cancelling system.)

The best performance was when I used a high quality studio microphone in a quiet environment to create my voice profile by reading their text. The recognition accuracy was amazing. I used an AKG C-3000 (needs phantom power), but I've heard that a Sennheiser MD431 II is another excellent microphone, and has noise canceling properties as well. The best performance I got from my ANC-750 headset was when I used the voice profile created with the C-3000.

I give the voice recognition part of the software a 5, the navigational ability a 2, and the included microphone a 2, hence my rating of 3 overall.


Incompatible with Word 2003   January 4, 2004
Dr. Edward M. Erris (Clarks Summit, Pa United States)
47 out of 49 found this review helpful

I have used ViaVoice Ver10 Pro USB for a little over a year with great results. On a fast computer system it keeps up with you almost no matter the speed of your speaking. It does occassionally crash. There seems to be a problem with it writing back to memory. IBM was unable to find the problem. It had done this on other computers as well. I've used it with MS Office XP Pro on my old computer. I upgraded to a new computer with MS Office Small Business Ed 2003 only to find that ViaVoice is not compatible with the components. I spent $9.95 in tech support only to be told that! They said that they plan to put that info on their website(Scansoft is now the tech support for this product). To date they haven't. Guess, they want to sell as many copies as possible before they make a patch. Anyway, if you're planning to use this with Office 2003 or higher it will not work and tech support will do nothing to help you except take your money.
Update: 5/5/2004: I contacted ScanSoft to find out if they are making a patch to make it compatable with Word 2003. Their standard answer is "We're working on it." If you go to their website you will find that they still haven't put in a disclaimer that it doesn't work with all Word editions. It just says that it does work with Word. I wonder how many refunds they are giving out for false advertising? I'm also surprised that the major PC magazines haven't picked up on this.


Crashes, crashes, crashes - DO NOT BUY   April 17, 2004
D. Marsden (Djibouti)
22 out of 24 found this review helpful

Installed ViaVoice 10 in Windows XP Pro...

And sometimes it opens and sometimes it doesn't. Mainly doesn't.

Then I find this...via Google..

Problem:

After launching Dragon or ViaVoice and clicking a link in one of the menus, the system locks up or freezes. Other symptoms include Dragon NaturallySpeaking's Select-and-Say or ViaVoice's dictation and commands fail in Microsoft Office XP applications, such as Word and Microsoft Outlook.

Cause:

Microsoft Office XP's "Alternate User Input" installs a background process called CTFMON.exe which can interfere with Dragon or ViaVoice. The following information was taken from the Microsoft website:

"...Ctfmon.exe monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies...."

And you can get NO, repeat, NO, help from ScanSoft.

DO NOT BUY!


Frustrating   October 26, 2003
13 out of 16 found this review helpful

Constantly crashes. When it does work, without crashing, it does well. Definitely need a good microphone.


Terrible Support - Many Installation Problems   March 3, 2004
Mark Early (Seattle)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

An earlier ViaVoice installation 3 years ago went fine and the product was pretty useful and accurate enough for my purposes.

ViaVoice version 10 however has been a nightmare. I still have not been able to install it on a Win2K-SP4 computer. I am a fairly advanced computer programmer/systems person with 20+ years of experience.

Support is virtually non-existent from Scansoft. My 30 days of free support from IBM where I purchased the product has not been honored. All support has to come from Scansoft.

Great features, if you can access them. I am seriously thinking of demanding my money back. Washington State has some very consumer friendly laws regarding "Fitness for Purpose", one more reason I am grateful to live in the Northwest.