Speech recognition in Vista

9 April 2007, 7:50 pm

It’s great having a few hours up your sleeve because I’ve been able to really have a play around with some the features of Vista. This weekend I’m beginning to play around with speech recognition capabilities of Microsoft Windows Vista.

So far its performance is not far from that of Dragon Naturally Speaking. In fact, its performance may be slightly better because the commands and instructions that you give the computer seem a little bit more intuitive than those of its competitor. I am writing this entry now using Vista speech recognition although it is taking a little bit of time as I get used to the different commands and ways of talking to the computer.

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All you need is a headset with a good microphone and you’re away. The level of accuracy should improve in time as the computer ‘learns’ more about the things you say. The program will also do a scan of your documents and emails to pick up on some of the common phrases and words you use. This seemed to work as when I was dictating it would suggest particular phrases or words that wouldn’t appear in a normal dictionary.

There are other training exercises that you can undertake to help improve accuracy. There doesn’t appear to be as many options for tweaking as there is in Dragon Naturally Speaking but on first glance these may not be necessary. Why? Simply because the interface with speech recognition is really easy to use. If you don’t know a command, simply say ‘show buttons’ and your screen lights up with numbered fields over all available commands on the screen. Then it’s a matter of choosing the number you want – the numbers flash on an off so you can still see which function you need. It also works on web pages by highlighting hyperlinks in a similar fashion – both in IE7 and Firefox. I did notice some strange behaviour in Firefox so there may need to be some further development to help in that area.

This is a great enhancement to Vista. I hadn’t tried the speech recognition in XP but it certainly seems to be working well in this latest operating system. A speech recognition facility is vital if you spend a lot of time on the PC as it can give your typing hands and mouse hand a rest when doing some day to day tasks. In my experience, a combination of all three user interfaces is the best way to go as speech recognition still has some limitations. And if you work in a noisy environment you’ll probably find it no use at all as other loud noises in the room can cause some odd behaviour.

Otherwise, if you haven’t tried voice recognition, it’s worth a try. It’s not completely without errors, but with some perseverance and practice, you will find it a useful addition to the PC toolbox.