Can you ditch your keyboard with Windows Vista?

Speech recognition is built right in to Windows Vista. But is it any cop? There’s only one way to find out: use it for an entire working day…

You get the best results if you use a headset, so I plug my Logitech USB headset (pictured on next page, bottom right) into my PC. Control Panel crashes. I reboot and make a sour face.

Everything’s behaving now, so I set up the speech recognition. It’s just a matter of telling Windows Vista I’ve got a headset and following a couple of dialogue boxes before trying the interactive tutorial.

The tutorial takes you through the essentials, so you learn how to dictate, navigate and, most importantly of all, the “What can I say?” command that brings up a quick reference window.

“Start Notepad. Start WordPad. Close window.” Great: all my commands are recognised. Let’s try some dictation.

Accuracy is excellent, and to correct an error you just say “correct” followed by what you want to fix. Say it again and a numbered list comes up. So, for example, the recogniser has written “store” when I said “stone”. To fix it I say “correct store”, “stone”, “one”, “OK”. Easy.

The correction process is really slowing me down. I reckon I’m achieving about a quarter of my usual working speed.

Navigating around Windows is easy as pie. “Start. Pictures. Double-click autumn leaves. Maximise that. Close Window.” Nice.

There are two problems with wearing a headset: your ears get hot and you can’t hear the phone ringing.

Lunch!

Windows Media Player works fine with voice control, but it demonstrates another headset issue: when you’re listening to music, you can’t concentrate on what you’re dictating.

Email’s a pain, because I don’t tend to store people’s addresses in my address book – so creating a new message means painstakingly spelling out the domain name. Navigating around the email window is OK, though and, like other programs, you can use the “show numbers” command to divide the window into numbered sections.

Internet Explorer’s a bit of a nightmare. I’m using “show numbers” again but there are so many links on typical web pages that when I do that, there are too many numbers on screen and I forget which one I wanted to click.

Hello, keyboard! I can see the benefits of speech recognition – it’s great if you can’t use a keyboard or mouse, and dictating documents is much faster than the two-fingered typing method most people use. But for me, it’s much slower than I can touch-type and dictating breaks the magic bond between my brain and my typing fingers.

The main issue is the amount of correcting I had to do (although the more you use it, the fewer mistakes it will make). If you don’t type quickly, though, speech recognition is worth the initial investment in time. Put it this way: becoming a fast typist has taken me 15 years, but Windows Vista should be able to manage decent dictation after a couple of days.

Gary Marshall is a freelance journalist who writes about technology, the Internet and pop culture. His website can be found at www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com.