Speech recognition is a great way to interface with your computer if your job means your hands are usually doing something else, or you never learned to type.
Instead of pounding a keyboard with a bizarre layout designed in 1872, you can talk into a microphone and the words appear on the screen as you do so. Well, that’s the theory anyway.
Useful though it is for professionals, Microsoft’s support for speech recognition in its Office and Word products is limited. It’s currently only available in the Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, US English and Japanese language versions of Microsoft Office 2003, and it is only possible to give spoken menu and toolbar commands in the US English version.
It is not included in Microsoft Office 2007 at all, though it is embedded in Vista, and it may well provide the many fumble-fingered typists out there with a good reason to consider migration.
Word processing in Vista
Vista has built-in speech recognition, which is not only available to Word or other compatible text-entry applications, but which really works. It’s very easy to set up, too. You just plug in the headset, start the speech program and follow the wizard. When prompted, do take the time to print out the tables of commands from the Help file – click the ‘Show all’ button first. Take the tutorial as well – it’s mercifully brief but very informative.
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