Windows Vista lets you speak to your computer

Imagine a life where you don’t have to use your keyboard or your mouse to perform standard tasks on your computer like writing an E-mail, opening MS Word, etc. Don’t be surprised. This is a new feature from the latest version of the Windows operating system, Windows Vista.

Windows Vista comes with integrated speech recognition software which recognizes and executes voice commands like “Open Word” or “Write Mail”, etc. Now anyone can just sit in front of a computer and ‘speak to the computer’ instead of using your keyboard or a mouse. It runs an additional piece of software in the background to enable speech recognition tasks. But, the user has to spend at least an hour for the system to get acclimatized to the voice. This is a revolution in the way an average user interacts with a computer at home or at office.

Windows Vista’s speech recognition technology is said to be reasonably reliable, however it is not meant for professional use as there are better tools available for users who dictate text on a daily basis.

Windows Vista was codenamed ‘Longhorn’ before it was officially announced. It was officially made available for purchase and download from Microsoft’s website on 30^th Jan 2007, 5 years after Windows XP was released. This was the longest gap between releases of any two versions of Windows.
image courtesy: www.wikipedia.org