Vista's speech recognition software

[Guest]

Recently I’ve discovered that Vista (RTM version 6.0 build 6000) comes
bundled with speech recognition software (speech to text); which sounds
great, to be sure.

Has anyone actually used it? How does it perform? Does it allow for
dictation in MS Office 2007 (Word)? In fact, how well is it integrated into
Office 2007?

What is the best microphone to use? I would prefer using a wireless
microphone; but am not sure what to buy here - any suggestions?

A Bluetooth based headset would ne bice, but I’ve heard in the past that
they are not very suitable for speech to text applications due to the limited
bandwidth of Bluetooth and the subsequent high compression used to overcome
that limitation. Though Logitech claim their ‘Mobile Traveller’ headset would
do the job.

Has anyone used Vista’s inbuilt speech recognition software with Office 2007
and a Bluetooth headset? If so which headset worked well?

Lastly, can anyone tell me what additional services Vista runs for its
speech recognition software? Not that I’m short of RAM (2GB), but I’d just
like to know ;-)

 

[Tim]

I've tried it, and it's very good. The big improvement is that it's
integrated into the OS, which means that it (theoretically) can control just
about anything. And Microsoft has done a good job at making it so you can
control everything.

That said, speech recognition is still a long, long way off from being
useful to the average user. It's not only got to be perfect in
understanding what you're saying (even rare errors are very annoying), but
it really needs to read your mind. Until they can get it so it's truly
conversational (think Star Trek), it's just going to be a niche product. I
see that as being maybe 15 to 20 more years away.