Quick question about windows XP

Never wanting to leave a good deed unpunished, Microsoft began taking advantage of the growing speech recognition industry as early as Windows 95. Then, it was a simple API intended to give basic text to speech and commands to such things as Encarta and other MS programs. It had to be added separately, usually by installing it along with a program.

Basic voice recognition technology was included with Windows 98, and fully integrated by the introduction of Office 2000 and the MS 2000 operating system. This was little more than an attempt to control and shape the development of VR software. It was not until Office 2003 that it really became more full featured, and Vista Home Premium. In XP to use its functionality, one must have an application that takes advantage of the SAPI.

The best general VR package out there is Naturally Speaking/Dragon. I have been using it since 1997 and version 1.0. It has come a long way since then...

This is a powerful tool for content creation and communications--as one can rapidly create an article--much faster than by keyboard. It just takes a little getting used to. But to put a final answer to the question, what is available in XP all depends on the applications you have loaded on your computer--such as Office.

Look for Tools > Speech on the Word menu. I tried it for the first time about a month ago. I need to do a lot more training. It was definitely true that the more training I did, the better it got at understanding me.

-- Patey