As tutorials go, this one is excellent, and there's a big reveal partway through-the tutorial isn't just teaching you, it's adapting to your voice as you work through each section. right into a tutorial.Īn attractive but severe-looking young woman will guide you through the initial tutorial, which introduces all the basic commands and provides plenty of practice in using basic tools like the corrections features. It couldn't be simpler, and there's nothing to install. Starting the program is simple-the 'Speech Recognition' control panel applet allows you to set your microphone and toggle the recognition engine on. With Win 7, Microsoft's speech recognition has come into its own. Speech Recognition is an unsung bright spot in Windows Vista.' Back in 2007, the New York Times' David Pogue wrote, 'I don’t find it quite as accurate as my beloved Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, which is freakishly, 'Star Trek'-ishly accurate. It wasn't until Windows Vista, though, that speech recognition was baked right into the operating system, and was done so in a competent way. Microsoft rolled out a speech recognition engine in Office XP after installing the suite, users who opted for the speech recognition engine could dictate into Word and other apps. We'll spare you the suspense: serious users will want to look elsewhere, but this is a great way to show any colleague with a Win 7 machine that speech recognition is real, it's here, and it works. Ars Technica's Editor-in-chief Ken Fisher and I put Win 7's built in recognition engine to the test for a couple of months to find out how well it serves the needs of the hardcore word jockey. For the casual speech recognition user, nothing beats free-especially when one considers the $100+ price points for third-party software.īut is it powerful enough for serious users? One long-running criticism of Microsoft's bundled Windows software is that is strives only to be 'good enough' without ever achieving excellence.

With Windows 7, Microsoft's speech recognition has become a decent productivity tool and one that the company should be proud to proclaim as an OS feature. Microsoft has pumped out voice recognition software for years, but the company has a curious aversion to publicizing the fact.

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