Windows vista speech recognition review

Maybe next holday I can afford to pawn enough to run it. Try and remember you are riding the crest of the ridiculously over-compensated when writing this stuff.

I was able to command my Apple Macintosh Quadra av by voice in — seems like with 14 years to work on it, voice recognition might have come along as a more important technology by now. Sounds like they copied the commands from Dragon NaturallySpeaking which I teach. Now maybe people will be interested in learning speech since it will be an IT thing rather than an administrative assistant thing.

I agree on everything except the accuracy compared to Dragon. In Vista, you just do it. Much more intuitive. Dragon does have its advantages, though, such as macros.

I once used IBM ViaVoice in the late 90s, and it seemed pretty cool at the time, but I gave up on it because I spent too much time making corrections. I could not agree more. With Adondo PAL software www.

When you call your PC from wherever , it answers quite pleasantly. I doubt most people will ever want voice recognition. It would be easier to write revisions than to follow complicated command syntax to tell the PC what to cut out, change, or prettify.

The single largest oversight…or undersight by Apple is that they have never incorporated a highly effective speech recognition software with their products…. OSX has the same built in capabilities. Ever since Star Trek made it seem commonplace, many computer users have dreamed of being able to throw away their keyboards, exterminate their mice, and control their computers with their voices.

Programs that make it possible to issue commands or dictate text to your computer have been around for many years and have proven especially useful to those who are physically unable to use other input methods. But such programs have never really gained widespread popularity.

Windows Vista is the first Microsoft operating system to come with speech recognition built in. Previously, speech recognition functionality was a part of Microsoft Office XP or Office or could be added through third-party software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Microsoft's Voice Command added limited speech recognition to Windows Mobile operating systems. In any case, you had to buy and install additional software. With Vista, it's not necessary to buy anything extra to start talking to your computer. It's not enabled by default, but it's right there in the Control Panel, ready to be set up, as shown in Figure A.

Developers can use the Vista speech APIs to add speech recognition capabilities to any application. However, Vista's speech recognition doesn't currently work with all languages. It's available in English both U. When you click Start Speech Recognition, the Speech control console will appear at the top of your screen, as shown in Figure D.

If you have speech recognition configured to start when Windows boots up, the console will appear when you start your computer. You can select Speech options by right-clicking the microphone icon, either on the control console or in the system tray.

This will display the context menu shown in Figure E. You can set up your microphone from the Speech Recognition Options dialog box or the Speech context menu. The microphone setup wizard will first ask you to identify your microphone type headset, desktop, or other. The wizard recommends that you use a headset, and I can verify that the microphone type makes a huge difference.

The first time I tried to use Vista's speech recognition, I was using a desktop microphone that works fine for such tasks as recording voiceovers for PowerPoint presentations in Camtasia. However, when I tried dictating in Vista, the results were laughable; I was rarely able to dictate a whole sentence without at least one misinterpreted word, regardless of how carefully and clearly I tried to enunciate.

After I switched to a headset which cost about 30 dollars more than the desktop microphone , accuracy improved to the point where mistakes were occurring once every five or six sentences rather than several times per sentence.

After you select the microphone type, the next page of the wizard shows you how to position it correctly for best results. Next, you're asked to read a short bit of text aloud into the microphone, as shown in Figure F. The microphone is now set up and ready to use. However, that doesn't mean the speech engine is ready to work with your voice. If you have a standard, newscaster non-accent and always enunciate very clearly, you might be able to use speech recognition without training it to your voice.

If you have a Texas accent as I do, or any other nonstandard way of speaking, you'll get much better results if you go through the training process. Training process involves reading a series of text selections, one screen at a time, as shown in Figure G. I point with my mouse, click with my foot, type with my voice, pick with my finger and slurp with my mouth.

The voice-to-text engine found in Vista Speech Recognition is powerful, intuitive and extensive. This program accepts commands for working with windows, dictates into mainstream word-processing and email programs, fills out forms on the Web, and allows you to click anywhere on the screen with only your voice. Keystrokes are outdated. The average purchaser of Windows Vista may not even know that Speech Recognition shipped with their operating system. It is not on the Start menu.

It is not in the All Programs menu. You have to dig for Speech Recognition. With Windows Speech Recognition, your voice is heard right from the start.

A guided setup and tutorial familiarizes you with key concepts and commands. Windows Speech Recognition also features an innovative, intuitive user interface that assists you in controlling many operations of your computer by voice. Dictation: this is what saves keystrokes on the keyboard. You can dictate into Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Notepad, and other various applications to produce emails and documents. Commands: this gives you dictatorial leadership over your computer.

You can open and close applications, format and save documents, and click anywhere on the screen [see Mousegrid screenshot. Correction: you can fix words that were incorrectly interpreted easily by selecting that word using the correction feature in Speech Recognition.

It normally gives you different options to choose from. When you right click on the taskbar, it gives you many options to choose for correction as well as settings for Speech Recognition.

Constant Learning: you can set up Speech Recognition to learn more about your style from documents that are already on your machine. You can also do more training on your own to teach Speech Recognition more about your speaking style [see Speech Recognition Training, Speech Recognition Training 02 screen shots.

The better it understands you, the faster it will run. November 22, Carpal Tunnel is actually a relatively rare affliction. It's the most publicized form of a more general class of afflictions called Repetitive Stress Injury or RSI for short. I've written about RSI before as I've received treatment via occupational therapy and physical therapy.

It's a serious ailment and treatment and education does help. I should add that RSI is much more widespread and takes on many forms such as tendinitis, neuritis, etc This is one of the top reasons I'm excited about upgrading to Vista no, haven't done it yet It's too bad that one demo went poorly; the Slashdot crowd were very quick to write off one of Vista's best features due to an audio input problem.

Jon Galloway. November 23, I use one most of the time. The weight of your hand will be absorbed in the cushioning instead of pressuring your tendons. Speech recognition will not replace keyboards and mice in the work place.