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Tools

Name Dictation? Voice commands? Dictate in browser Dictate in any program Info
Braina Yes Yes Yes Dictate into third party software and websites, fill web forms and execute vocal commands.
Caster Yes No No Caster (built on the Dragonfly framework)
Click by Voice (by mdbridge) No Yes No No Chrome extension allowing activating links & other HTML elements w/ voice commands
Dragon Professional Individual (DPI) Yes Yes Yes Yes
Dragon Professional Anywhere Yes Yes Yes Yes
DragonUtilities Add-Ons for Dragon Speech Recognition
KnowBrainer No Yes No No
LilySpeech Yes Limited Yes Yes
LipSurf Yes Yes Yes No Google Chrome extension, adds commands and (if you pay), dictation, inside Chrome. Interesting command called ‘Tags’ where all clickable UI elements in Chrome are numbered so you can click on them by voice. Similar to ‘Show numbers’ in KnowBrainer 2017, and a few other programs that offer the same functionality.Seems to use Google’s speech recognition engine.
Otter Voice Meeting Notes Yes No Yes No ‘Otter.ai frees you from taking notes at meetings, by automatically joining selected meetings, and producing live transcriptions that you and other participants can annotate and highlight in real time.’
SpeechMagic Yes Example Nuance Communications acquired Philips owned. Medical industry focus according to Frost & Sullivan. Standalone or embedded.
Speechnotes Yes No Yes No
Speech Productivity (SP) Yes (needs Dagon installed) Yes No Yes, via special ‘Dictation Box’ (using Dragon) Offers a much improved Dictation Box.
SpeechTexter Yes Yes
Talon (voice command and dictation software) Yes Yes Yes Yes The developer has developed his own speech engine (based on Facebook technology). His model, called ‘Conformed D + Whisper’ is almost as good as Dragon for regular dictation, and much better than Dragon for voice commands. After 10 years of battling with Dragon, I think I may have finally found a Dragon killer!
Tazti Yes Create speech command profiles to play PC games and control applications – programs. Create speech commands to open files, folders, webpages, applications. Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 versions.
Vocola / Unimacro No Yes No No Open source alternative to KnowBrainer 2017 (see above). Commands stored as easy-to-edit text.
VoiceAttack No Yes No No
VoiceBot
VoiceComputer add-on for Dragon
VoiceMacro No Yes No No
Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) / Cortana Yes Limited Yes Yes Crap, as usual, from Microsoft.
Microsoft's new
  • Voice access
  • Voice typing
Yes Limited Yes Yes Finally, Microsoft’s built-in speech recognition is improving. Microsoft recently bought Nuance (makers of Dragon), and I suspect the new ‘Voice Typing’ in Windows is based on this, as the quality is much better than the old WSR engine. Extremely limited commands, and the second you finish speaking it stops listening, but the recognition is as good as basically already as good as Dragon, but there is no need to install anything on your computer.

External links

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