A hundred times.
I thought that rather than type everything I'd try speaking it instead. So, for the first time, I hooked a microphone up to the computer and fired up Vista's speech recognition.
I didn't have particularly high hopes. The last time I saw it being used was when a hapless presenter tried to show off a beta version of windows at a talk they were giving.
The results were highly amusing, and probably the product of beta code and a dodgy microphone setup. However, they did serve to put me off trying to use the system (although it is very funning when the presenter says "delete sentence" and the system dutifully puts "delete sentence" into the text).
The training session is interesting. You go through learning how to control the program whilst at the same time the system is learning how you speak.
This means that you can say profoundly wrong things as you train it, and it still seems to work (although this will come back and haunt you later when it uses the trained data to try and make sense of your real speech).
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