I’m a HUGE fan of the Dragon Dictation app for iOS. I use it almost daily to spit out a text or two. Also, I’ve used it’s companion search app for web search and such, but the dictation is as close as this iPhone 4 fella will get to Siri (and, it’s all I need – ignorance is truly bliss).
I’ve always seen the Dragon Naturally Speaking application for the computer, but never have tried to dive in. Well, I just heard about Windows 7speech recognition, so I thought I give it a try. I vaguely remember it’s announcement when Win 7 was launched, but kept that the back of my mind. After becoming reliant on the iOS app, I felt it might be handy to have speech recognition in my day to day routine on the computer. After about 10 minutes of going through the setup to allow windows to recognize my voice, it turns out that it’s pretty great! In fact, I’m dictating this whole post at this very moment.
Although I’ve just been using this system this morning, I think it’s going to turn out to be pretty useful. I see using it mostly for dictating emails and long text, but it is actually nice to simply say “open a program” and see the program simply appear. OK, maybe it’s just geeky kind of stuff, but that’s right up my alley.
If you have a windows seven computer, it’s definitely worth checking out. In order to find out how to use it, click your start button and tie speech recognition. You should see what you need there. All Windows 7 versions have it, so knock yourself out!
