I read an interesting article today; I almost forgot that Windows Vista included speech recognition. Speech recognition is nothing new, it was available with Office XP and Office 2003 with Windows XP, but now speech recognition comes built into Windows Vista, and it really works! In fact I am writing this entire entry using speech recognition and dictating the post into word. Even Windows Vista home basic comes with speech recognition, you can use it to dictate into your computer or even perform commands a mouse clicks using it. It does take a little bit of getting used to but for the most part it works extremely well.
In fact using speech recognition I can open documents, save documents, change text formatting and more without having to touch the keyboard or mouse.
To use speech recognition in Windows Vista click on your start button, and type speech. You’ll see the speech recognition program appear in the search results. Click on it and the wizard will start and walk you through setting up your microphone, adjusting the levels and starts the tutorial for speech recognition. Tutorial walks you through how to dictate into your computer, how to control applications and how to issue voice commands. If you ever run into problems all you have to remember is to say “What can I say”. This will open up the help for speech recognition. Under control panel and the speech options you can trade the system even further.
Like I said earlier, I have done this entire post using speech recognition. I had to touch the keyboard a few times but that was more because of my own screw ups then problems with speech recognition and recognizing what I am saying. I am sure that dictation will only get better as the computer learns the way I speak and the words that I commonly use. But so far it has been really neat to be able to dictate this in as opposed to try to type everything myself. I think for the first time that I have used it it has done a very admirable job, it has been slightly slower than me typing everything in but the mainly because I am still learning the system and it is still learning me.
I will update my experiences with voice recognition as I use it more and more often.
In fact I have even use speech recognition to go back through this post and correct things that I found wrong again without touching the keyboard.
Stephen