CPU Recommendation for Speech recognition

I do a lot of dictating of reports using Vista's speech recognition and
Microsoft Office 2007 Word. I'm currently using a dual core processor (X2
4400). I would like to upgrade my computer for better performance and speech
recognition performance is the most important factor to me. Would I be
better off with a quad core processor like the Q6600 or a dual core
processor that is faster?
Thanks.

LJS

 

How about a better microphone/sound card (lower electrical noise) and a
quieter environment (less background noise to confuse the speech
recognition)? Also, avoid drinking alcohol - even small amounts make life
difficult for speech recognition.

Andrew

 

Andrew,
Thanks for the reply. The accuracy of the speech recognition is fine. I am
using a Sennheiser ME 3 microphone with an Andrea USB adapter instead of a
sound card. I dictate in a fairly quiet room. By better performance I mean
the latency or rate at which the dictated words appear on the monitor after
they are dictated.
LS

 

Is the speech recognition program multithreaded? If it is then you'll
benefit from a quad core otherwise you won't. Try the following
experiment, check and see if your BIOS allows you to disable one of the
cores. If it can then turn off one core and then see if you see a big
performance difference. If you don't see a difference between 1 and 2
cores then you definitely won't see a difference between 2 and 4.

 

I'm using speech recognition which is part of Vista (the operating system
itself) to dictate into Microsoft Office Word instead of a separate speech
recognition program such as Dragon or Via Voice. I'm not sure how that
actually uses multithreading but Vista I'm sure does. Thanks.
LS

 

Unfortunately the fact that it is part of Vista, and Vista uses
multithreading doesn't actually tell you anything useful. Vista
is not one program that does all of the Vista things. It is many
separate programs - the joins are well-concealed in some places -
some of which are multi-threaded and some of which are not.

The logic was approximately "I have a sheep" (I'm using Vista) and "Some
sheep are black" (Vista uses multi-threading) therefore "my sheep must
be black". If MS had required of the Vista development teams that every
single program in it be as multi-threaded as is humanly possible, it
would not have been released yet, and we'd be looking at some time in
the 2030s for it.

You need to do the test, as described.

 

Even if the speech recognition module itself isn't multithreaded, Vista is
enough of a hog that a quad core is probably desirable - one core for the
desktop window manager/GDI, one for the Office UI, and one for speech
recognition is already 3

 

Why does the app have to be multi-threaded?
All desktop Win NT run dozens of threads.

About a decade ago people were saying a dual PPro system was
more responsive than a PII. Less context switching, still true.