It’s kind of interesting, I’ve been interested in speech recognition for many years. However, only recently has the technology really started to become useful. While it was included in Windows of XP, but I did little more than to test it out a little bit.
Obviously, speech recognition has been included in Windows Vista as well. Of course since I have recently purchased a high-quality headset for video conferencing, it also works very well for speech recognition. So once again I am going down the path of using speech recognition for writing tasks and sometimes for command and control.
Very early on in the mid nineties, I had found a small inexpensive utility that recorded small snippets of voice that could be assigned to certain control functions for the operating system. It was really fun at the time to tell your computer to launch an application, or close a window, or click on things, but it was very limited. Most of the new or state of the art speech recognition tools and technologies, allow a person to do many more things.
Training and practice still make up the large part of successes in using speech recognition technologies. Speech in Windows Vista is no different than in any other product; but it still requires patience and perseverance to make practical use of the technology.
Still, I have had a lot of fun of dictating this blog post and exploring the speech recognition features in Windows Vista. Will I still continue using it? I’m not entirely certain. In many situations I might, as it significantly reduces the amount of typing I need to do. However, it does not always reduce the amount of time needed to write anything, nor the time to correct punctuation and other items that it misses.
