Dictation and voice command tools

Back to: Software

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.
Windows Voice Access (in Windows 11)	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

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_software
• https://www.knowbrainer.com/forums/forum/ (Best places to learn about dictation, voice commands, etc.)
• Voice Recognition: a Brief Comparison of Dictation Extensions for Google Chrome

Still processing

• https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
• https://kaldi-asr.org/
• https://github.com/julius-speech/julius
• https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter
• https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/DeepSpeech
• https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq
• https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq
• https://alphacephei.com/vosk/
• https://github.com/athena-team/athena
• https://espnet.github.io/espnet/
• https://fosspost.org/open-source-speech-recognition-2020/