Professional version brings voice recognition, navigation, and control to
Microsoft Office. 

by Stan Miastkowski, special to PC World 
September 14, 1998, 12:44 p.m. PT 

Repeat after me: Competition is good. A certain large software company in
Redmond may not agree, but the proof certainly shows in voice recognition
software. Over the past few months, I've been working extensively with voice
software. And as the four major companies in the genre--Dragon Systems, IBM,
Lernout & Hauspie, and Philips--slug it out, a leapfrog effect has started,
with each company coming out with better software. And prices keep falling,
too. 

With its latest products, L&H has taken an approach similar to IBM ViaVoice,
offering three versions of Voice Xpress, each designed for different kinds of
users. Voice Xpress Standard ($49.99) offers basic voice recognition, Voice
Xpress Advanced ($79.99) is designed for use with Microsoft Word, and Voice
Xpress Professional ($149.99) offers full-fledged support for all Microsoft
Office applications. 

I tested a prerelease version of Voice Xpress Professional, and it goes way
beyond its predecessor with a raft of useful features. And speech-to-text
conversion is much improved, to boot. 

Voice Xpress Professional has a new "modeless" design, similar to its
competitors' products, that lets you switch between dictation, editing,
navigation, and desktop control using voice alone. When you're dictating, you
just talk continuously. Commands ("move to beginning of document," for
example) are detected by your pauses before and after, and navigation and
desktop control ("Open Microsoft Excel" or "Switch to PowerPoint") respond to
specific phrases. It sounds complicated, and you do need to become familiar
with the various key phrases, but Lernout and Hauspie has done an excellent
job of creating a powerful and integrated voice package tuned to Microsoft
Office users. 

As with all voice packages, you'll need to do some preliminary work, spending
15-30 minutes training Voice Xpress Professional to your voice. (Different
users can create individual profiles.) Basic voice recognition is very good,
and it gets better over time, as the package continues to tune itself to your
idiosyncrasies. Of course, you'll also have to train it to recognize words
that aren't in its vocabulary. No voice package understands "Miastkowski" the
first time I say it. 

L&H says you need a minimum of 48MB of RAM and a Pentium-200, but the faster
your CPU, the better the performance. Even the PII-333 system with 64 MB of
RAM I used slowed down occasionally. 

Voice recognition isn't for everyone; speaking is vastly different from
typing, and requires some getting used to. But if your fingers are getting
tired, Voice Xpress Professional does the job and is close to the current
state of the art--until the next version, that is.  

