Why the silence on speech recognition in Windows 7?
I’m lying in bed tonight trying to sleep. But there I was, 4:00 AM, wide awake thinking about how long my to-do list is and how I really need a personal assistant. Then I start planning how I can sell my husband on the idea and rationalize the cost. Then it dawned on me, if I can dictate my notes and email responses to my computer, it would be way faster than I could type and I could probably get everything done much more quickly.
So I pulled out my Droid Incredible and Binged ‘speech recognition Windows 7’. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I didn’t expect to find that Windows 7 had speech recognition built in natively. One of the first links was to this YouTube video demoing the capabilities. I’m so blown away by the idea of this that I jump out of bed, turn my computer on, and test it out.
An hour later, here I am, speaking this blog. I even tested it out and replied to an email from a colleague in EMEA.
Now it’s not perfect. It works best if you dictate, they go back and correct on the keyboard, but still, dictating this is so much faster than typing it would be.
I realized, why have press not been talking, no pun intended, about this? It’s groundbreaking and actually works (unlike past efforts). Instead, we are all punch drunk on multi touch and iPads. Multitouch and iPads are amazing, I’m not going to pretend they aren’t, but speech recognition would truly revolutionize the way we interact with computers.
Take this a step further - imagine a mash up of multi-touch and speech recognition. As soon as I thought of this, I realized that’s possible today with the new touch screen monitors and laptops that run Windows 7.
I literally, have wished for decent speech recognition since 1998, when I was in high school. Ask my dad - he tried to explain why the software wasnt’ good enough yet. My future, is now.
Tomorrow, I’m going to give it a test run and use this at work tomorrow. And at the bottom of my emails I’ll say “email spoken through Win7…pardon my language”
