I have books.

I have lots of books. I HAVE A BATSHIT INSANE RETARDED AMOUNT OF BOOKS. I AM DYING UNDER A MOUNTAIN OF BOOKS. I need to discipline them. I need to list them.

So, the most obvious way it to grab my laptop, open excel (or whatever respectable equivalent I have), and to type every title and author I see. At the end of it (in 140 years), I'll have a nice list, and fingers shrivelled down to one phalanx and a half. Okay, better start early.

However I see two other hypothetical options :

1) Finding a GOOD voice transcription software, that would allow me to simply read out ever name and title on the book's back, and then process that list. This would be way faster than typing them all. But the only softs I've found yet (on android) just wrote down five lines of text before calling it a day, and wanting a next file to be opened manually.

Does anyone know of a good efficient voice transcription software, that I could use to dictate one humongous list, interrupting myself only to recharge batteries (a few thousand times) ?

2) There seems to be online databases for audiophiles or games, where people simply tick their possessions and presto, get a nice self-managed list with full details. But is there such a thing for books, including out of print academic titles in franch translations ? I doubt so. You doubt so too, right ?

So, back to 1. Voice transcription software advices ?

Why not? https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/my-book-list-scan-isbn-barcode/id443391908?mt=8
I believe there is a pc program for it too. http://www.collectorz.com/book/

Hmm. I might try that (maybe even borrowing an iPhone), but I hoped not to have to pull the books out of the shelves, and just read the backs...

Has today's speech-to-text software been perfected enough? I imagine it'd have problems with non-English words and proper names, plus you'd always have to correct even normal words that appear in any dictionary due to disturbances in the speech canal and/or homophones. You'd be much better off employing idle household members for the task. ;)

The only one I know by name is Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is largely due to the usage of 'Dragon' in the name.

http://www.goodreads.com/ is the closest I know, OTHER than using full-on bibliographical software (which there is some FLOSS library cataloging out there).

Understand but it seems alot less time consuming plus with the software you might get alot more extra info with it.
Just saying.

I'll test the trial version.

But I expect annoyance with older books without isbn...

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Edit :

Gah. Tested two random books. One was unable to deal with accents ("<<l'>>extrãeme Droite En Europe", published by "La Dâecouverte" :-/ ), and the other one (9782702824931) wasn't in the database.

Probably good stuff, but doesn't look straightforward applicable to my library...

If you're using Windows, you have a speech recognition app already.

I tinkered with it years ago and I found it handled children's book text pretty well when spoken carefully.

Something to watch out for, though: You must apply it to a Microsoft product, like Word. If you use it instead with something like Firefox or even a non-Microsoft plugin with Internet Explorer, the app totally falls apart (by design) and becomes unusable.

I haven't used the most recent version, but it's probably worth a look.

...if you are running your computer in an appropriate OS language and you have the right OS language installed.

Supported languages are apparently: English (U.S.), English (U.K.), German (Germany), French (France), Spanish (Spain), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified); any other language doesn't even let you access the speech recognition (even if the language packs are installed).

Arrgh. I should have known it wouldn't be universally easy, thanks for the catch.

I think it's not perfect, but I think Dragon is something like 97% at this point. But, that's for English, I'm not sure what the options are like for other languages. I would assume that the 10 most spoken languages would mostly be well supported. It's mostly the smaller languages that don't receive enough attention that tend to suffer.

On that note, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Google does at handling my terrible Mandarin. Single words don't usually work, but full sentences do.

Fortunately for a lot of people(people who make money transcribing audio), no such software exists.

Dragon used to require a plug-in sound card. I can't find the hardware requirements now, but be sure to, er, somehow check whether it works before buying, because the damn thing is $75.

And if you find a decent library solution, do tell. I was looking for one a couple of months ago, and I eventually decided on an sql database with a frontend app to be repurposed from a "free" document management demo when I have time. Which is to say, it's LibreOffice Calc and banana crates for me now.

Dragon can also be modded and extended with some Python knowledge.
Using Python to Code by Voice, though perhaps not applicable to Telika's issue (but might help with moving between fields and entries in a form).