Rowland, back in the 1990's I used the now-defunct Voice Xpress
Professional to dictate my journals. While it didn't do well with Filemaker
directly, it was optimized for use with Microsoft Office. Consequently, I
dictated text akin to your example into Microsoft Word (on Windows), and
that worked fairly well. Then I would save the Word document as text and
import into Filemaker.

Back then the accuracy was somewhat spotty, and I spent quite a bit of time
correcting mistakes. In the end, however, it was probably faster (and
certainly a lot easier) to dictate rather than type. Products and
processing power have improved considerably since, and, as Steve says,
something like Dragon Dictate will probably turn your voice into text just
fine. I'm guessing that you may not be able to dictate directly into FM but
really don't have any recent experience to support that conclusion.

James
www.james-mc.com
Words To Live By


On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 7:55 AM, Steve Moore <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Rowland,
>
> OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has dictation built in, but it requires an
> Internet connection to get to the Siri servers for "translation." You put
> your cursor into a field or other text entry area, press the hotkey to
> activate Dictation, and speak. The translated text is entered into the box.
> However, it will not interpret your "new record" command or your "tab"
> command.
>
> There is a product called Dragon Dictate that will do what you want,
> including the commands, but it costs $200 and each user must "train" it
> with their voice. Here's an article explaining the differences:
>
> http://www.macworld.com/article/2014417/mountain-lion-dictation-versus-dragon-dictate.html
>
> I have used Dragon Dictate and it works well. There is definitely a
> learning curve for making the best use of it, but it works as advertised.
>
> --
> Steve Moore
> Cumberland, Maine
>
>
> On Mar 19, 2013, at 5:00 AM, Rowland Carson wrote:
>
> > I'm wondering if it would be practical to transcribe manuscript data
> into a FileMaker Pro file using voice recognition software. I'm hoping it
> would be possible to say something like:
> >
> > new record, 15 May 1947, tab, 7.35, tab, blue, tab, 3 hours 22 minutes 7
> seconds, new record, 3 June 1947, tab, 10.78, tab, yellow, tab, 1 hour 11
> minutes 45 seconds, new record ......
> >
> > and have the voice-recognition software do all the equivalent keyboard
> actions to get the data into the FMP file. This seems as though it should
> be much faster and less effort than typing it myself.
> >
> > Does anyone have any experience of using any make of voice recognition
> software with FMP in this way? Anything recommended, or to be avoided? Any
> gotchas?
> >
> > I'm using FMP 11 on a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6.8.
> >
> > in friendship
> >
> > Rowland
> >
> > | Rowland Carson          ... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
> > | <[log in to unmask]>            http://www.rowlandcarson.org.uk
> > | Skype, Twitter: rowland_carson      Facebook: Rowland Carson
> > | pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/rowlandcarson
>