Windows 7 and speech recognition--by Jiangkuo

Jiangkuo has some problem using the blog, so I help him to post.

Having installed Windows 7, I was keen to see whether the speech recognition function had improved. I’m happy to report that the speech recognition function has indeed improved. In fact I’m writing this post using the speech recognition function and I have to say from my perspective its accuracy and ease of use are greatly improved.

It works fairly well with Internet Explorer but I’m afraid to say that speech recognition works not at all with Firefox, which is disappointing but I suppose hardly surprising. Voice recognition is probably a pretty complex thing!
What is noticeable is that the speech recognition seems to have improved enormously in its accuracy (of course having said that, it took me four or five goes to get “in its accuracy” right - oh the delicious irony). But apart from that I think the potential benefits of speech recognition are terrific. It does seem that the ambient noise problem of earlier versions seem to have been somewhat overcome and this version is picking up very well on vocal signals rather than background noise.

The odd bit of traffic noise in the background will still make my speech recognition system think I have said something but rather than insert a word it will simply ask the question, “what did you say?”. This is a much better solution than inserting gobbledigook.

But frankly, I never really had the time or patience to stick with speech recognition because even for this simple article I’ve probably spent about half an hour longer than I normally would have trying to correct all the mistakes that the speech recognition system has made. One suspects that speech recognition is a little bit like typing in that you really need to train and then keep practicing regularly to really see results in accuracy and ease of use.

I’ve always thought speech recognition would be useful if if you suffer from RSI or some other injury that left you unable to type. If you really needed to use it then you would have the patients to train and get it right. But for me, for now, speech recognition seems to take longer than typing. I suppose if you’re willing to invest the time and effort then you may find that speech recognition holds the promise of easy navigation and simple and accurate text manipulation/editing it has always promoted.

And one more thing before I go, speech recognition in Windows 7does seem to be on a par with other software packages such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, which as you probably know, come at a premium in terms of price.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3VZnyKViC4