this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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So... apparently Dragon Naturally Speaking (version 16!) has them all blown out of the water....
unexpected factorial
Version 20,922,789,888,000 ?
God that app was such trash. Voice recognition simply did not work in the 2000s yet everybody and their mother tried to push it upon us 20 years too soon, just like they're trying to do now with LLMs.
It is only just barely usable today.
Remember when windows vista itself came with a voice to text assistant / keyboard thing?
I remeber trying to train that software for hours as a kid just for it to still not understand me half the time lol.
You have reminded me of one of my favorite videos of all time
That was incredible. I had no idea it could be so easy.
I was thinking it was going to be this one:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4
Ironically, it was LLMs that made voice recognition work, but nobody is interested in pushing them anymore.
There's a significant minority of us who relentlessly demand a TTS computer with Majel Barrett's voice.
Good thing it's not Morgan Freeman, then. Even naturally sounding like him can get you sued for impersonation, IIRC. 🙃
I love my local LLM voice recognition on my PC through Speech Note on Linux.
I don't know to me the level it worked, is what makes it really silly to me that so few things can handle local transcription today without cloud services. I felt like it was 99% accurate running on a crappy win XP system with like 256 MB ram. Seems to me that it's crazy that 20 years later we're "well we need to hook you up to a supercomputer to do that".
We literally have Enterprise wide systems where I work that had version upgrades over the last few years that moved transactions from our servers to cloud based ones. It's been a fucking mess for every single application that did that. Regular outages with no real communication or ETA, and there's nothing my team can do about it
Blast from the past, I remember having this included with some game I bought in the 90s and it felt very Star Trek at the time.
I used to work with a pathologist who was so old and stuck in his ways that when the practice was shifting to Dragon, they allowed him to remain on the old transcriptionist service, even though it cost them more.