Speech>Microphones & Recorders>USB Sound Devices

High-quality sound input is essential for speech recognition applications. This is provided by a combination of an approved sound card and a good noise-cancelling microphone.
Unfortunately computers and notebooks manufactured before July 2007 that use pooly shielded built-in sound chipsets can suffer from electromagnetic noise generated by power and other electronic circuits. This noise can make it impossible to obtain accurate speech recognition.
Microsoft now require motherboards manufactured after July 2007 to have sound chips that process audio free from electronic noise from within the computer.
The best way to avoid such noise problems is to use an external USB Sound Adapter. The USB device converts speech into a digital form outside the computer and is therefore not affected by internal electromagnetic interference. The digitised speech is fed directly into the speech recognition program through a high-speed USB port.
The ideal USB sound device is Full Duplex, (both sound input and output). It should also allow any noise-cancelling microphone to be plugged into the pod, rather than the microphone being hardwired into the device.

Note 1: USB sound systems should not be placed on top of sources of electromagnetic radiation such as monitors or power cables.
Note 2: Primary USB devices (i.e. those active 100% of the time such as microphones) should only be installed on USB 1 or USB 2 - the primary USB root hub - that have priority in the system. USB sound adapters do not perform correctly when connected through a hub or docking station as other devices sending or receiving packets of information may cause some sound information to be dropped.
Note 3: Dropouts are sometimes associated with network interface cards. The problem may be solved by moving the NIC to another slot or changing the I/O settings.

NB: USB Sound Adapters require Windows® 98 SE or greater. Windows®NT 4 does not support USB sound without additional third-party software.

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