Diane D's List: Software

• WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period. People who fly more than this need to purchase the Pro version if they wish to continue to use it after a 30-day trial period.

• The only downside is that VLC 1.1 has yet to be released. You can download a nightly build though and try out VLC Extensions.

• For example, with the help of extensions users can quickly access subtitles for a movie, lyrics for a song or information about the current artist.
• For example, with the help of extensions users can quickly access subtitles for a movie, lyrics for a song or information about the current artist.

• It can be a fun thing as well as very frustrating. You must train your computer how to listen to your voice through some sort of training application.

• serious users will want to look elsewhere, but this is a great way to show any colleague with a Win 7 machine that speech recognition is real, it's here, and it works.
• Navigation and OS control are the best features of the built-in recognition engine, and they worked almost flawlessly.

• You can say just about any scrap of text visible on the screen, from menus to filenames to dialog box options, and the software correctly clicks, selects, or opens. Opening, switching, and controlling programs was simple, easy enough to figure out without even glancing through the printable speech recognition cheat sheet. And when you don't know what to say or there's nothing in particular to say—like when trying to click some icon in Word's ribbon interface—there's still no need to resort to the mouse.

    

  Instead, a simple "Show Numbers" command will overlay the current window with a host of blue rectangles, each placed above a clickable object and ea
• ch containing a number. Once the rectangles are displayed, say the number and the computer clicks fo

• r you.

      

   
• it's perfected here
• There are limits to navigation and control, and you'll see them most in third-party apps like Chrome.

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• , and herein lies the main issue with Win 7's speech recognition: it's just not as good as alternatives from companies like Nuance, which makes Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
• the built-in correction tools get a pretty decent workou
• several years of experience with voice recognition have convinced me that it needs to be superb before it will be widely used.
• For someone who plans to use voice recognition with regularity, investment in a third-party program would be preferable—especially since Win 7 includes very limited tools for customizing its dictionary and none at all for setting up things like voice macros.
• everyone who works with words more regularly would benefit from doling out some additional cash.

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• The voice-to-text engine found in Vista Speech Recognition is powerful, intuitive and extensive.
• Windows Vista Home Basic can be purchased for $184.99. Voice recognition software from a competitor with all of the options that are available in Windows Vista Speech Recognition costs much more. And you don’t even get this groovy operating system from the competitor for that price. When shopping for voice recognition software, you’d be wise to consider Microsoft Windows Vista with Speech Recognitio
• The competition (Dragon Naturally Speaking 9) does have a version of voice recognition software that will work with all Microsoft Office applications. It retails on their website for $899 (http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/). You have to pony up to their Professional package in order to get all the features that you find in Vista Speech Recognition, again without an operating system surrounding it.
• You need good hardware to run Speech Recognition without going insane waiting for the program to respond to your voice. More on this in the Performance section.
• eight to ten minutes of initial trainin
• Good hardware is essential for this whole Vista Speech Recognition thing to work
• In order to get a good response from Speech Recognition, you’ll need a fairly beefy computer
• The minimum requirements on the website don’t say this, but my personal experience would tell me that a dual core processor with at least 1GB of RAM is needed for good performance. You should get a good sound card and set Speech Recognition to run through it as well
• . When I’m fresh in the morning, I don’t have nearly as many corrections. I may be able to speak over 100 words per minute but the corrections cut that in half a lot of times
• Since this program is proprietary to Microsoft, nearly all Microsoft products work with it well.
• The dictation function is world class.
• to more quickly and more effectively correct sentences, say a phrase of words to correct rather than just one word.

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• VideoCacheView v1.86