by David Hakala

Q: I think I have trained my Dell Vostro/Vista to recognise my voice, but how do I actually put it into practice? I will shortly be having to type a quite lengthy report and it would be really useful to merely speak to my laptop since my typing speed is bit tortoise-like! – Nigel

Speech-to-text, or speech recognition, is a feature built into the Vista operating system. Like all the many components of a general-purpose operating system, Vista’s speech recognition is not the best of its breed. Third-party speech recognition software such as Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking are more reliable than Vista’s built-in stuff. For a “quite lengthy report” and regular use, I would highly recommend investing in top-quality speech recognition software.
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