Approximately 10 years ago I tried speech recognition on a 386 PC. The experience was not very good and typing was much faster. Speech recognition under Windows Vista is very fast and easy. The setup requires a headset which has a microphone and time to train the software. After plugging in a headset and starting up the software from the control panel, I was able to quickly set up the gateway Tablet PC.
Immediately after reading through the training, a friend instant messaged me. Unfortunately Microsoft messenger did not understand me and kept asking, what was that?. I was able to speak and the typing would occur in Microsoft word 2007; therefore, I would speak and then copy paste that typed text into Microsoft messenger. This was not very convenient and I hope Microsoft figures out a fix.
This problem does not exist in Microsoft live writer. In fact, this whole blog post is done through speech. The typing is extremely fast. And there has only been a need for a few corrections due to my stuttering and from indecision about what to say. Most of the challenge during the speech recognition seems to be my own speech pattern.
I plan to keep practicing speech recognition and I'm very curious if I will be able to speak while I am reading an article. The plan is to have the PDF file open and I will talk into the microphone so that my notes are recorded. This might speed up the process of reading and recording notes of the hundreds of articles I have to read to complete my dissertation.
Update. I spoke too soon. Speaking the title of this post does not work and when I try to publish there's an error message. In order to get this to publish, I had to type the title. Also, I will need to figure out how to format the fonts while I am speaking.


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