After Years of Effort, Voice Recognition Is Starting to Work
From: Wall Street Journal - 01/10/2007 - P. B1
By: Lee Gomes 

While fully functional, ubiquitous voice recognition remains far away, new
technology is allowing more and more machines to understand spoken commands.
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Bill Gates and Ford Motor
executives discussed the use of Microsoft Sync software to allow drivers to
adjust their car stereo or make phone calls using voice commands. Microsoft
Vista has speech recognition software included in it, but Microsoft is not
currently promoting or providing much support for its use. Naturally Speaking
is the present leader for PC speech recognition, as most who use it agree
that it works rather well out of the box and that corrections are easily
made. This software allows a user wearing a headphone to dictate text that
then appears on the screen; the software improves in effectiveness as it
trains itself to a user's unique speaking style. Analyst Bill Meisel says the
technology is mostly applied to legal and medical practices, as the average
PC user is perfectly happy using a mouse and keyboard to communicate with
their computer. Increasing computer power means that voice recognition
programs, which use statistical methods to match spoken sounds to words in a
database, can now be trained for thousands of hours before being shipped,
compared with dozens of hours 10 years ago. Meisel predicts that speech
recognition will next appear in search engines, as both Yahoo and Google are
planning to release voice-enabled search for mobile devices. IBM has
envisioned software that can create transcripts from meetings of as many as
four or five people, as well as translation software for broadcasts. The
latter technology is far from being perfected, but it is currently able to
convey general meaning. 

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Links:
Ford Sync
http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=25169

Microsoft Automotive
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsautomotive/default.mspx

Naturally Speaking
http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/

Bill Meisel
http://www.tmaa.com/meisel.htm