hardware system requirements

My friend Molly recently posted on her blog about hardware system requirements for speech recognition. I believe that her recommendations are overstated, although your experience may vary depending on what software you're running at any one time.

Nuance' s system requirements for Dragon NaturallySpeaking are the following: 1 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, 1 GB hard drive space.

Molly's recommendation is for a 3 GHz and dual core CPU, 3 GB of RAM, and a 160 GB, 10,000 RPM hard drive.

My computer is currently a single core processor running at 1.5 GHz, 1.5 GB of RAM, and a 150 GB hard drive running at 7000 RPM (I'm not so sure about the speed).

It's very easy to find out if your computer is the bottleneck for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. While you are using the program, right-click on your Windows taskbar and select task manager. Go to the performance tab and pay attention to the CPU usage graph. You'll notice that it will fluctuate quite a bit as he do different tasks with your computer. When I'm dictating my CPU goes up to 100% sometimes, but only for short periods of time, perhaps a few seconds. Another thing to pay attention to is the physical memory section of the performance tab, especially the number next to a available memory. My computer currently shows that I have about 800 MB of RAM free.

With a 32-bit version of Windows, I'm not sure how well Windows or Dragon would take advantage of a dual-core processor.

Another useful thing to do with Windows task manager is to go to the process tab. One of the columns on the process tab should be memory usage. If you click that column header you should be able to sort the list of programs there by how much memory they are taking up. Currently for me, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is taking about 170 MB of RAM. It is highly unlikely that unless I was working with a lot of video files or large Photoshop files, that RAM would be a problem for my system.

However, if I were using some programs that were CPU intensive, it is possible that my CPU would become the bottleneck.

Overall, unless Dragon is saving a lot of your speech files all at once or doing its adaptive learning, it will not be accessing your hard drive very much. So hard drive space and speed will probably not be the limiting factor.

A faster more powerful computer is always better. However if you have any reasonably recent vintage computer, say within the last three years, most likely your computer is not going to be a problem for you. So I would not rush out and buy a new computer just if you're going to start using speech recognition, unless your computer is very old.

RAM and hard drives are relatively cheap; actually RAM is absurdly cheap right now. So if you want to knock yourself out go out and buy upgrades for your computer. However if you have a slow processor most likely you would have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM. This would still be cheaper than a new computer, but it is more work to find the components and install them.