As the mom of a newborn I am finding that having my hands free to take care of the baby is essential. As someone that also relies heavily on typing I thought that it might be helpful to be able to dictate text to my computer. Today I decided to give the speech recognition functions in Windows Vista a try. After running the tutorial and one of the training sessions I was able to begin typing text into Notepad and Wordpad by speaking into a microphone. Once you’ve learned the basic voice commands for various tasks in Windows it is fairly easy to maneuver around. I can switch between applications, open and close applications, access menus, and a variety of other functions.
After training the computer to recognize my voice, and training myself to use some basic voice commands, I set out to begin dictating text into the computer. After several unsuccessful attempts to dictate into Firefox and Microsoft Word 2003, I found that dictation does work in Notepad and Wordpad. While being limited to these programs for consistent dictation results is inconvenient I can dictate into one of these programs and then paste the text into the program I want it to appear in.
I don’t know that I would say that dictation is faster for me since I am a relatively fast typist, but it is nice to be able to have my hands free to do other things, without having to stop working. I plan to see if I can get my Bluetooth headset working with this so that I can gain even more flexibility and possibly not have to be right next to my computer to dictate.
Unfortunately for me, I discovered this built in (and free) feature of Windows Vista after I had already ordered Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred. The software will be here next week and I plan to do a review to compare and contrast between the built-in Windows Vista speech recognition and Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred, which will hopefully handle a variety of programs more effectively.
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