Request for talk to text recommendations

[clevermanka]

Because of the way my brain works, re-wiring it to write fic/tion by speaking would take energy I don't have right now. But I know I could talk out the thoughts I've been having about tarot and spirituality that I haven't been writing down (because I want to save that energy for writing fiction lol 💀). So I'm finally at a point where I'm ready to look into appropriate talk to text software! Yay!

Since I haven't had anything resembling a reliable income for nearly a year (and don't see such happening for a while) it needs to be something that at least comes with a free trial. Recommendations, please?

Comments

[digitaldiscipline]

it doesn't look like dragon naturally speaking still has a free/nagware version, so i rolled around in google for a while and this list (bottom half of the page) seems to hit most of the ones others recommend - https://www.techradar.com/news/best-speech-to-text-app#best-free-speech-to-text-apps

[clevermanka]

Nice! Thank you!

[nnozomi]

I've been looking at a thing called notta that looks promising? It has a free version. I have not actually tried it! so can't guarantee anything, apologies if it's not what you need at all.
https://www.notta.ai/en

[clevermanka]

I'll give it a look, thanks!

[kimboo_york]

A lot depends on what software you want to use the software with. You might do well to mix and match, depending on what you are doing. Yes, Dragon is fantastic, but it's expensive and also a resource hog, you really do need the latest computers/laptops to run it. It will crash your system hard if you don't. Unless you are using voice commands or extensive text-to-speech customization, it's overkill. You don't need it.

If you use Chrome browser, you can use speech-to-text in a google document and it is really very accurate.

Otter.ai is great, and has a free option for 600 minutes a month. With that you can record directly or upload a recording (I use otter for getting drafts of transcripts for my podcasts, as well as ideas I record on my phone while walking).

LilySpeech is a good option if you want to integrate it with LibreOffice. It's worth the $30 for the full version to go ad-less. It uses google's tts engine and can support multiple languages.

If you want quick tts on the go within your browser, Speechnotes.co is a site I've been recommending to students for a few years now. It's also a good way to start training your brain on using tts, which is tricky (as we've discussed in the past). Only works in Chrome and FireFox browsers, last I checked.

If you have a specific set up you want to use with tts, let me know!

[clevermanka]

AMAAAAAAZING info, thank you!