I actually purchased Via Voice, Millenium Edition ("Web" edition), on a whim, just to see how far voice recognition had come. Though impressive at first -- I was able to dictate short e-mails with fairly good recognition-- the software soon became irksome. Although 99% recognition sounds good, it amounts to a loss of 1 word for every 100, which is hardly "continuous voice recognition" if you need to keep going back and correcting yourself. With that in mind, when you also account for punctuation (which you add by saying "period" or "comma"), most of us can start to type faster than we can speak into voice recognition software.

Some particular features of Via Voice Millenium I didn't really appreciate were the supposed web enhancements, found in the version I purchased. While it was interesting to be able to navigate Internet Explorer or America Online by only speaking numbers and so forth, it was much slower than using a mouse or keyboard.

As far as ease of use, though, IBM has done a good job documenting and setting up menus and installation to make it as intuitive as possible. Read a few story passages, taking about a half-hour each. Unfortunately, the text-editing features aren't so good; while you can edit text entirely using spoken commands, such as "select <word>" and "delete this" or "new line", most of the time you just find yourself saying "scratch that" (i.e. erasing the last word), which defeats one of the promising but ultimately underused features of the program -- the ability to adapt, over time, to your voice. In essence, you have to go back and manually select the correct spelling of misspelled words from a pre-set dictionary, and if the word isn't in the dictionary, record the word for Via Voice to add to its data base (as far as it seems).

One side note is that the microphone/headset that comes with ViaVoice is fairly good; it fits nicely, covers one ear, and places the noise-reducing microphone right at your mouth so you don't have to lean in to dictate. Software calibration of the microphone is also straightforward.

If you're interested in experimenting with voice recognition for a good price/performance ratio, I'd say go with Via Voice Millenium; it's got promise, and given that, if you spend the time, you can train it to improve its recognition of your voice, I'd recommend it. Still, for everyday use, Via Voice Millenium sorely lacks what Dragon has apparently already arrived at -- *real* continuous general dictation.

The one other note I'd add is that, for medical professionals and medical students (like myself), you can add a medical words module onto ViaVoice relatively inexpensively, compared to the other software packages; when trained properly, the software can be a true asset and time-saver, but if you don't have the patience to read through enough text and correct the software, then be prepared to scan the dictated text for occasional errors -- not a good thing, especially when it comes to patient data.



Recommended: No