I am writing this blog post using voice recognition in Windows Vista and Microsoft Office Word 2007. I briefly trained the computer to recognize my voice using the well-designed voice tutorial and training wizard. My intention is to publish this entire post without touching my keyboard or mouse.

I am still getting the hang of using voice recognition. I have not yet memorized the basic commands, but most of them are pretty intuitive and I get it right anyway. The best thing though is that the dictation is extremely accurate. I began with about 10 minutes of training and the system learns to better recognize my voice the more use this feature.

The next thing I would like to learn is how to use voice recognition to insert characters such as quotation marks. It is very easy to use punctuation like periods, commas, exclamation points! And question marks? It is surprising that the voice recognition system is able to use the inflection of my voice to determine whether I mean to dictate the name of the punctuation mark or to insert the punctuation mark itself.