During a recent voice recognition hiatus I went in search of alternatives to Dragon Naturally Speaking. The problem was that DNS 10 wasn’t compatible with Vista 64, so knowing that Vista had Speech recognition built in, I decided to give it a try; what could it hurt right?

Setting up the speech recognition in Vista wasn’t hard, but the actual usage was horrible [in comparison to DNS]. You enter the control panel, enable voice recognition and do some simple voice training [5-10 minutes]; something you don’t have to do with DNS 9.

I guess it’s a silly thing, but Nuance has had years to perfect their SR technology and the user interface. I think the simplest way for me to say it is ‘the meat and potatoes’ of getting stuff done.

Microsoft wants you to click on things to activate it or use your voice to sole control everything and this is just not what I consider user friendly- it’s like a forceful nudge; do it this way. Nuance recognizes that a mouse is not always the quickest way to get things done and allows for the use of ‘hot keys’ to perform functions such as Mic on, Mic off, correction, force dictation and so on…

The biggest difference and problem with Vista voice recognition is that it only seems to work in Microsoft products. Dumb- Yeah I know. If I tried to use Vista voice recognition every phrase was questioned. The application would understand what i said, but it would never past it in to a application other than Microsoft.

For instance, I could use voice recognition for Notepad, Wordpad, Word, Excel, IE and so on… Dictating in to these applications was actually pretty good and accuracy was comparable to DNS, but when corrections were made, I didn’t like sounding like ‘Robby Robot’ with ’select…1…ok’ to make corrections- hot keys could do this much faster.

The COMMANDS worked in these applications as well. So you could say FILE/OPEN and EDIT/COPY and various other things, but again it was only in Microsoft products that this worked; to me this is just a complete failure. Vista voice recognition only works with Microsoft products that’s playing favorites at it’s worst.

DNS, as far as I know, you can at least dictate in to most any application. The COMMANDS may not work in all applications, but the dictation is nice; isn’t that really 90% of the goal?

The ‘dockable toolbar’ GUI for the Vista voice recognition was not to my taste either. I don’t want anything on the screen while I’m working [trying to work], I just wanted the software to do what it needs to do and stay out of my way. This won’t happen with Vista’s voice recognition, it’s right there the whole time; it’s annoying.

There were some other front end options for the voice recognition for Vista; to add more functionality, but I didn’t find any of these worked properly with Vista and my opinion is that it’s too young to really replace the front end of Vista voice recognition.

My final verdict on Vista voice recognition is that it works, if you’ve nothing else. It’s bundled with the Operating System and it ‘could help you’, but for me it was more of a hassle. If you’ve never used voice recognition before, this will be a nice testing ground for you. But if
you want to be productive and have a nice clean interface I would say just use another voice recognition program, but the current market says either you use Nuance [DNS/ViaVoice] or you use Microsoft- so it’s kinda limited.

Regards,
NapoleonAG
Email/IM: NapoleonAG.TSS@Gmail.com
Website: www.TechSideStories.com

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