looking for software and digital recorder for lectures....?

Question

i have been looking at the dragon natural speak software, and some compatible recorders. my question is, in my lectures A LOT of my profs have strong accents; does anyone know if this type of thing will work? ANY advise/recommendations will help. thanks

Answer 1

As far as I know, speech recognition has not yet reached the level of sophistication to support a large number of speakers .. i.e. recording numerous people and having it transferred to type. I could be wrong on this, though.

Generally speaking, most speech recognition software has to go through at least some minimal "training" by the speaker using it, and you also have to speak slower than you ordinarily would, so there is a good chance that your professors, even those without accents, would speak too fast.

I would recommend one of these two methods:
Taking notes on your laptop or on a PDA with a keyboard, OR
Recording on a small recorder, tape or digital, then listening back, and taking hand notes where needed.