Is there an effective speech recognition application for Ubuntu?

Question

I'm looking for something that works as well as the Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Windows Speech Recognition or MacSpeech Dictate - except for Ubuntu. Does such a thing exist?

Answer 1

According to this Wikipedia article*:

There is currently no open-source equivalent of proprietary speech recognition software (e.g. Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking or Windows Speech Recognition) for GNU/Linux. However, there are several incomplete, open-source projects and solutions that could be used to attain some elements of speech recognition in the free operating system. It is also possible to use Windows speech recognition software under GNU/Linux.

I think it would be possibly (and fairly easy) to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking in a virtualized Windows environment by running Windows in something like VirtualBox.

*Depending on how much faith you put into Wikipedia articles

Answer 2

I know that this questions is "old", but I can confirm that Dragon runs fine (although a little "slow") within recent versions of Wine.

Note that what doesn't work is the ability to "dictate anyware" as "non-wine" windows are not recognized as being "dictable" fields. But if you dictate inside the DragonPad, then everything works perfectly.

Cheers!