scanner and computer

[DaviidL]

We found out that my dad is losing his hearing and he is always listening to the local fire department on the scanner he has. My question is and maybe someone can tell me where to find it, but a few years ago there was a program that was out where you could hook up a scanner to your computer and anything that was said on the scanner would be displayed on the computer monitor screen. If someone knows this program and where to get it please let me know so that he can see what is going on. Thank you for your time and help with this.

[bpsmicro]

You're talking about speech-to-text? While there are some programs out there designed to let people talk to there PCs and have the speech recognized, these are intended to be trained to each individual's voice and, while improvements continue to be made, the technology isn't mainstream.

There's definitely nothing available today that can just listen to anybody's speech and be able to recognize it very well, and *definitely* nothing that could make out voice coming across radio, with all the incumbent noise & static and codes and such.

What you're probably remembering is software like ProScan or one of the ARC programs (depending on the scanner) that you hook up to the scanner's serial port, and it can display the channel/talkgroup it's on, but that's unrelated to voice itself.

Brad.