Freeware and Shareware
Resources in this section are often free, or are available at low cost from the manufacturer.
- AutoIT
(http://www.autoitscript.com/)
- AutoIT is a scipting environment for Windows, including Windows Vista that allows the construction of very complex and elaborate macro programs. It differs from other macro environments in that the macros can be compiled into free-standing applications, so that the person using the Macro does not have to install AutoIT for the macros to work. Like all macro environments, AutoIT takes some time to learn, but is well worth the effort.
Commercial Resources
Speech Recognition
- Dragon Naturally Speaking (http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/)
- Dragon Naturally Speaking is the direct descendent of one of the first large vocabulary speech recognition systems for the PC, Dragon Dictate.
- Naturally Speaking allows continuous speech (as do all "modern" systems) for dictation, and allows voice command of the computer interface.
- SpeakQ (http://www.wordq.com/)
- SpeakQ is an add-in to WordQ (and cannot be used without it) that provides speech recognition for the Windows platform. Where Dragon Naturally Speaking is designed as a keyboard replacement, SpeakQ is designed as a keyboard enhancement. When a phrase is spoken, it can be inserted directly into the target document, or can be used to refine the prediction offered by WordQ. The training program for SpeakQ reads the text to be spoken aloud, so that even people with very limited reading skills can train the program.
Word Prediction
- WordQ
(http://www.wordq.com/)
- WordQ is currently available only for Microsoft Windows, including Microsoft Vista. It provides word prediction, word completion, abbreviation expansion, and text-to-speech. The text-to-speech feature uses the high-quality Acapella voices.