Alternative to Dragon NaturallySpeaking?

Question

Is there a Ubuntu alternative for this program?

Answer 1

There is a whole Article on Wikipedia dedicated to the Problem.

Unfortunately, it seems there's currently no one solution that works well enough, but a massive list of projects that are underway.

You may want to rummage through the list of solutions to see if there's anything that fits your needs.

Platypus:

There's always the possibility to run Dragon Naturally Speaking using WINE. The Platypus Project is creating software to redirect Dragon's output to any Linux / X application, and they are very far along.

You should definitely take a look at this.

Answer 2

For an updated answer, here is an article from March 2018: Best Free Linux Speech Recognition Tools – Open Source Software.

This article highlights the best open source speech recognition software for Linux. Note, some of the software is in an early state of development, and is therefore not ready for widespread adoption.

Before examining our recommendations, Jasper is worthy of a special mention. It’s an excellent open source platform for developing always-on, voice-controlled applications. You may be wondering why HTK doesn’t appear below. For sure, HTK is a popular speech recognition toolkit. But HTK is not eligible to feature in the recommended solutions. Not because it’s copyright is owned by Microsoft, but simply because it’s proprietary software.

Let’s explore the 6 free speech recognition tools at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page with a full description and an in-depth analysis of its features.

Open Source Speech Recognition Tools

• Mozilla DeepSpeech: TensorFlow implementation of Baidu's DeepSpeech architecture (website/source).
• Kaldi: C++ toolkit designed for speech recognition researchers (website/source).
• CMUSphinx: Speech recognition system for mobile and server applications (website/source).
• deepspeech.pytorch: Implementation of DeepSpeech2 using Baidu Warp-CTC (website/source).
• Julius: Two-pass large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine (website/source).
• Simon: Flexible speech recognition software.

Answer 3

You can install Chromium 11 version from the ppa ppa:chromium-daily/stable (How to add an PPA) and add --enable-speech-input to the end of the launcher.

Now visit this website and whoo! Speech-to-Text on ubuntu using html5.

I read here that if you speak slowly it will be more accurate.

Answer 4

freespeech-vr

Is a decent open source speech to text engine. Here the source code (on Google Code)

Note that it takes a bit of configuration, which is less polished than Dragon Naturally Speaking's configuration.

Answer 5

Dictanote

To expand on Alaukik's answer, there are apps built on top of Chrome speech recognition capabilities.

I personally use Dictanote (it is very similar to Dragon). Here is a link to chrome app.

Answer 6

Try Mozilla DeepSpeech an opensource tool for automatic transcription. But you will need to train the tool or download Mozilla's pre-trained model. For very clear recordings, the accuracy rate is relatively good. but for my projects, it was still not sufficient, as the recordings had lots of background noises, they were not of good quality, I used Transcribear instead, it's web based editor that allows for automatic transcription, but you will need to be connected online to upload recordings to the Transcribear server.

Answer 7

If you are Google-tolerant, there's Google Voice typing in Google Docs in Chrome. Open a blank Google doc, do Tools->Voice Typing, click the mic and talk away. In 2020 it seems to be better than the last time I tried it circa 2018, seems about the same error rate as Dragon based on a quick one-paragraph test. Less customization unfortunately, can't teach it custom pronunciations of words it doesn't know. Here's the docs. There is also the "Voice in Voice Typing" Chrome plugin to make speech-to-text available in all web input boxes.