As someone who spends a lot of time writing, I’m always looking for new ways to do it more efficiently to speed up my work. To my surprise and delight, I recently discovered that Vista comes packaged with speech recognition capabilities, and I’ve begun working with it to see what it can do for me.
In fact, this entire blog entry was dictated to the computer (as opposed to typing it). I can see that I'll need to work with it in order to teach it how I want it to work. And, it may be a bit of a stretch at the moment to make it work with my crochet designs due to the nature of the many abbreviations in the crochet language. But, I have high hopes for it, and it is already helping me in my general writing. At the very least, it will speed up my blog writing!
If you’re interested in trying this out, I suggest starting with a quality headset microphone that has a USB connector for best results. (I bought mine from Best Buy for about $29.95.) To the best of my knowledge, speech to text only works with Windows Vista unless you have installed stand alone voice recognition software.
Here is a page from the Microsoft Web site that explains this far better than I could and will help you through the setup.
The speech recognition software is not limited to writing. You can use it to open and close programs, switch between windows and a multitude of other tasks. If you have a chance, give it a try. At the very least, it’s fun to work with. At most, it has the potential to make your work easier.
Now, I just have to explain to my family why I’m sitting here talking to my computer…
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