Some months ago, I read that Scott Hanselman was using speech recognition in Windows Vista. He was very pleased with the speech recognition, so I tought it was time for me to try this new feature. I have been running Windows XP until now, but after service pack 1 for Windows Vista was released, I decided to try it out.  I am very pleased with this new OS (at least new to me). It is fast, looks nice, and it seems to me that it's very stable.

To day when I was at this big warehouse called Jula to buy a lawn mower, I saw this cheap microphone. So, I bought it. When I came home, I hooked it up to my computer and started two write this post using speech recognition. I think it works perfect, well almost perfect. It has some problems with some letters and some words.  Something the computer finds difficult to understand, is the letter 'V'.  I haven't yet accomplished to get it to understand it. It might, of course, have something to do with my bad English pronunciation.

I first tried it without running the tutorial and the speech training you are supposed to run before using it.  It didn't accomplish to understand many of the words that I was saying, but after running the tutorial it nearly never misses a word.  It is also constantly learning, so it gets better for every word I say.  Two get the best results, I have to speak slow, and in a monotone voice.  A recommend that you try it out.  I think it's available in Windows Vista Home Premium and above.

This feature, I think, is very valuable to people with handicaps.  I can manage my whole computer only using my voice.  If they continued to improve this technology, I guess in few years there will be no need for a keyboard.

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