The new Windows/Office XP has speech recognition built right into it.  The
review below says that it is so so for general dictation but excellent for
executing commands and other computer chores.  For blind persons, this is
what we have all been waiting for:  a conversational user interface.  We may
no longer need to memorize long strings of keyboard equivalents or hunt
through menus.

Kelly




Chicago Tribune


Reservations and a rave on XP and speech
Binary Beat
June 17, 2001
James Coats


You've got to love one of the ironies created by Microsoft Corp.'s decision
to incorporate human speech recognition as part of Office XP, the company's
rather stunning new upgrade to Office 2000.

Until now, top Microsoft executives had insisted that because highly accurate
speech recognition remains beyond the reach of even the latest Pentium IV
howlers, Office and Windows would not attempt to accept text and commands
from the spoken word.

Bill Gates' close friend and Microsoft's longtime research chief, Nathan
Myhrvold, joked to at least one visitor that the acid test is to get past
today's
point, where one says to the computer, "Recognize speech?" and the computer
replies, "Wreck a nice beach."

So here's what Bill did. He let Myhrvold go into an ultrawealthy retirement
and added modules to Office XP that don't quite always "wreck a nice beach,"
but they come close-about 95 percent accurate, in fact.

I spent two weeks working with speech recognition in Word XP for this review
and must report that it was somewhat inferior to my regular speech
recognition
software, Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking.

For fairly casual users, I suspect that the XP speech module will serve
pretty well for those times when direct keyboarding seems too much of a
chore. I
also can see that this speech module in XP will have great appeal to casual
users because it is quite simple to use.

On the other hand, that same simplicity makes XP speech pale alongside
systems that are dedicated exclusively to converting human speech into
readable text.
As somebody who makes heavy use of speech recognition in the course of
writing newspaper copy, I can grade XP speech only a B-.

However, I hasten to add that a second feature of XP speech recognition
warrants an A+. The software accepts human voice commands in place of doing
things
like saving documents, selecting-cutting-pasting, formatting and a raft of
other moves.

This second command dictation feature lets me use Word XP without hardly ever
messing with the mouse or keyboard, and so I must give it my most rousing
rave.

Like other speech recognition schemes, Office XP's is based on training the
software for the user's unique speech patterns. The longer one uses it, the
more the software learns and the more accurate the input becomes. If I were
to use XP as long as I have used Dragon, I'm sure that there would be
improvements
in the recognition of words and phrases like rousing rave or wreck a nice
beach.

But even if XP reached a par with dedicated speech software in the area of
text input, there are major features lacking in the software's speech
modules.
Above all, XP misses the boat in the all-important area of picking up
punctuation commands as one dictates-periods, commas, colons, etc.

Also painfully absent is any feature allowing a user to quickly train the
software for either common words that aren't getting recognized or for new
words
not in the software's dictionary.

Instead of offering a word-by-word feature, XP's training module parses the
entire document each time it is called, making it a real chore to adapt the
software to new words or to introduce exotic ones. With XP and Dragon, a user
builds a powerful personal database of that user's own speech profile and
special pronunciation quirks, which greatly enhances efficiency. Both
programs make heavy use of analyzing past documents in order to learn words
and diction.

Dragon and other speech programs outdo XP by letting a user order the
software to learn from a long stack of documents in a single session, while
XP's learning
feature works only on a document that has been opened in Office.

The biggest lack in Word XP's speech software is that there is virtually no
written documentation, so the user is forced to learn by using the Help
feature
built in to Office XP.

Although I am getting very used to this sort of force-fed, help-screen
learning, a great many users simply will not click on the little yellow
question
mark and then put up with the awkward displays of information while trying to
figure out software.

Sadly, you must read the awkward help screens, and read them closely, to get
speech going in XP.

If ever there were a need for one of those Dummies books, it is for speech in
Office XP. Until then, I fear, it's not going to be easy to wreck a nice
beach
with Office XP.


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