Voice recognition on vista: out of the box

I was in for quite a surprise when I tried the voice recognition feature on vista home premium.

It really works. The good news is that it does a lot more than people are talking about. First of all, the tutorial shows you how to control the desktop via voice, which is a pretty impressive feat considering the simple commands. You can have the speech recognition open up automatically when the computer starts - a big deal if you are dealing with a laptop, open programs from the start menu, play games that are included in Vista like spider solitaire , browse the web (which appears to be better in Internet explorer then fire fox), and do computer maintenance. You can literally used the speech recognition to click on any file in a program that is vista related.

This made a huge difference as I was setting up the laptop. Meredith took it out of the box, started it up and wrote in my information, then turned it over to me as soon as I could boot up the voice recognition. I took the tutorial which was about 20 minutes long . Then I began setting up the laptop by installing antivirus programs, deleting some of the bloat wear, putting in passwords etc. I was able to do every task independently on my list of set up. This eliminates my need for othe software programs I was using on the Mac platform to supplement my use of Dragon Naturally Speaking.

It simply worked. It wasn't perfect, but even right out of the box it was good enough for me to independently set up a new computer and that's pretty impressive. In fact I'm writing this with the vista voice recognition because I haven't put dragon on yet. It's 5 hours later and I haven't had to put dragon on. Although it's possible that my experience with using voice recognition eased my use of it, I'm finding Vista voice recognition to be very useful as a tool.