So you have a new and Vista PC and you’ve always wanted to try speech recognition. You heard that all editions of Vista include some of speech recognition and so you’ll have to try it. Being Microsoft, you may be a little wary that there might be glitches.
With this in mind, on Buying my Dell Inspiron 9400, I thought I might as well buy the Dell BH200 Bluetooth headset (about £40). I wanted to use the headset for speech recognition. Well I tried and I tried. I just could not persuade Vista to play nicely with the Bluetooth headset.
I assumed Vista was misbehaving. So I read various articles suggesting that Dragon NaturallySpeaking products, now sold by Nuance, were much better than the Vista speech recognition software.
However before I went ahead to buy Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I thought I would just to experiment using just Vista with an inexpensive headset. I bought a noise-cancelling headset with microphone from Game. It cost the princely sum of £10.00.
Lo and behold it works! Well, to be honest it mostly works – it miss-spells some words. However, with practice it should get my words spelled more accurately as time goes by. Well I hope so.
Lesson One: Bluetooth modems probably do not work with Vista speech recognition
Lesson Two: if you already have Vista then speech recognition is an inexpensive option.
