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The Woes & Wonders of Voice Recognition

Way back when, in the time of Windows 98, I bought a voice recognition program called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It was relatively inexpensive and worked pretty well, all things considered. I tried installing it on my laptop, but the fan motor was apparently enough to really throw the thing off.

Dragon was taken over by their competitor and the program that I loved went downhill fast, imho. I didn’t buy the upgrade when I upgraded to XP. Until yesterday, as a matter of fact, I didn’t even know that my new Vista machine had something very similar already installed!

So while the thunderstorms kept me offline (I had to shut down the cable modem and wireless router, but managed to sneak on the desktop between raindrops), I managed to set up and “train” my new voice recognition software and it’s just as good as my old Dragon program, if not better! In fact, there are some fun new functions that help you correct mistakes – which the program inevitably makes.

It’s a little scary to actually write using this, but I did soemthing to my wrist the other day when I was lifting something and I don’t have the luxury of time to let it heal. I’ve promised to send something to an editor by the end of next week and it’s going to be ready by then come hell, high water (we had that yesterday with the storms), or sprained wrists!

So any of you with Vista and a microphone headset, check out the voice recognition software built into the OS. It’s pretty freaking COOL!!!