Earlier today I was talking to a friend of mine who is disabled about voice recognition. We discussed how a good voice recognition system might help him accomplish more on the computer faster. He mentioned one of his frustrations was that the voice recognition systems he tried couldn’t get a good, workable sample of his voice which is low, raspy and without a lot of inflection.

Tonight, coincidentally, through my normal reading I came across a Vista Voice Recognition Podcast by Chris Henley. This video shot with Camtasia was really well done, but I noticed that even with Mr. Henley’s very clear voice there were a couple hiccups like where he said “bill gates” and the program recognized it as “build.” Overall though it seemed like it was handling his speech very well. It showed off the built-in (no extra software, cool!) speech recognition features in Windows Vista which “… should be out by Thanksgiving.”

I’ve spent very little time with speech recognition functions on the Tablet PC, but I’ve been impressed with the quality of that engine. It’s my understanding that the Vista speech recognition is even better. I’d definitely be willing to use speech recognition if it could save me time. Blogging by voice seems particularly appealing to me because I speak much faster than I type, but to date with all the editing and insertion of HTML I’m not sure how this would work in reality. Theory it sounds good.

The real test is when somebody like my friend tries this out. How does the speech recognition perform under those conditions? What I saw on the video was promising and certainly makes me a little more excited about Vista. Hopefully it performs that well for somebody who really, truly could use this to make their computing life better.

• How to use speech to text dictation mode with the Tablet PC
• Why Linux on Tablet PC?
• When will Vista really come out?
• Gates dreams of $500 student tablet
• Improve Tablet PC Handwriting Recognition
• How long does it take to boot Windows Vista?