Did you know that Microsoft Vista has built in speech recognition?
(empty stare)
Microsoft has not marketed this feature at all, with good reason. My impressions since the early days of beta testing Vista to right now have been pretty much the same- it's a promising feature but is not quite ready to overtake the heavyweight leader in SR, Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Many of the commands that you use in NatSpeak can be used in the Vista interface. (coincidence?) I recall talking with a Microsoft rep at a conference a few years back who was presenting on the accessibility features of Vista. When I mentioned about Dragon Naturally Speaking, he gave a sly grin and said, "What's that?".
Regardless, I'm hoping that a less buggy, more usable flavor of speech recognition will be available in the next version of Windows. We'll see what happens once the beta version comes out any day now.
