Speech recognition software has come a long way since I first looked at it more than seven years ago.
Dragon Naturally Speaking 6 is about as good as it gets but still falls short of perfection.
The idea is to issue spoken commands to your computer instead of keyboard strokes or mouse clicks.
It sounds a fabulous idea but, sadly, the reality does not match the original vision.
The first drawback is that speech recognition (SR) software consumes system resources.
Although Naturally Speaking claims to run on a Pentium II/400, in truth it barely crawls.
To make SR fly you really need a big powerful processor, a shed load of Ram and the very best soundcard and noise-cancelling microphone you can buy.
Training speech software to recognise your voice can be a little tedious. The initial training process should take about five minutes but I spent more than 30 getting irritated.
When the program is set up the user can achieve the same standard of accuracy as a bad typist. As a reasonable typist, I found work a lot harder using Naturally Speaking.
Price: £137
Contact: 0870 8708085
Feel good factor: 6 out of 10
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