[Peewee]

Hi, I've had 7 for quite a while, but had endless problems getting online, and so used it rarely - I dual boot with XP. I recently bought a painfully cheap USB WiFi adapter from China, via Amazon, which fair blisters along. So, I'm using 7 much more.
I've been looking at Voice Recognition, and was wondering if anyone uses it usefully, and what for. Is it just a novelty? An advanced search here for "voice recognition" didn't get a single hit. Is that already telling me something?

[CoffeeFiend]

Most people don't use it because they prefer to use a mouse and a keyboard. Voice control would make most tasks quite tedious, painful, or downright impossible. Just imagine trying to retouch a photo using voice commands, or explaining to a card game which card to move where, telling a browser which hyperlink to click or which picture from the page to save...

As for the text to speech, it's not what I'd call "good enough", even with MS' latest/best SAPI voice (that would be Anna -- not that I've tested extensively every other voice from the MS Speech Platform v11, or in other languages). I mean, I have to concentrate and make a real effort to understand what's being said for most general purpose text...

IMO speech recognition is a great technology that works best in some specialized software, written for specific tasks. For example, I have an advanced "alarm clock" application running on a netbook, which also happens to show the local weather forecast. I could press a key or click a button with the trackpad to force a refresh, but it's a lot easier to just say "weather forecast" while you're getting dressed and have it fetch the latest data and say it out loud (it does sound good enough for that, with some text & SSML tweaks). It's also very useful to stop the alarm, snooze, set alarms, etc. I think it would also be fantastic if it could read the news headlines in the morning (from an RSS feed) but let's say I gave up on that very quickly after hearing how it sounds!

I really wish MS would make text-to-speech sound a lot better, and also fix the long-standing speech synthesizer bug in the .NET framework that leaks memory (a WAVEHDR or SPVTEXTFRAG) each time it says something... I'm definitely not holding my breath for either. if MS fixed those then I'm sure we'd see it being used a lot more.

[RJM]

I've got dragon naturaly speaking 11.something professional.. It's somewhat ok for dictating letters or texting (some of the errors are amazing). But you have to use the headset-microphone set that they give you. For electronics, after many training sessions I still cannot get it to understand the words ZENER DIODE. As soon as I say the word zener it centers the screen.