Vista Speech at NBEA's National Convention in NY

This blog gives five reasons why you should make the switch to Windows Vista voice recognition as soon as it is practically possible. But before we jump into that:

DOWNLOAD THE VISTA SPEECH POWERPOINT SHOWS

I posted the two, long-overdue Windows Vista speech recognition PowerPoints I promised at WBITE and NBEA. The shows support the Windows Vista Speech instruction as written in the new “DigiTools 2nd Edition” and “Microsoft Vista Speech & Handwriting Recognition” texts. Look in www.KarlBarksdale.com/books.html and click the links for the two books that are pictured. From there, they can be downloaded in both PowerPoint 2003 or 2007 formats.

PowerPoint 1: The first show is a Getting Started guide for Windows Vista speech recognition. The slide show will allow you to demonstrate what your students will be doing as they first start Microsoft Windows Vista speech recognition.

PowerPoint 2: The second PowerPoint is a collection of my most requested speech recognition slides entitled “Quotes and Concepts.” Feel free to pick and choose from among the slides and use as needed.

UBIQUITY & COST

The two Windows Vista speech recognition training sessions at the NBEA national conference were timely. With the adoption of Windows Vista exceeding even Microsoft's projections --over 200,000,000 will be on desktops very soon--Microsoft Vista speech recognition will give the technology something it has never had before . . .

Ubiquity.

High-quality Microsoft SR will now be available to people for free in their homes, at work and in their schools. As Andy and Chris (co-presenters at the two sessions) pointed out *Now, when we teach speech recognition, students will be able to go home (or off to college or to their jobs) and have free access to the same speech recognition software we're teaching in class without having to spend a couple hundred dollars.*

Call it a gift from Microsoft. Their speech recognition software is now so good that they could have chosen to spin it off as its own separate product and to make a profit on their years of research and development. Instead they chose to make it part of the Vista input technologies suite, which now includes support for:

* Keyboard
* Mouse
* Handwriting recognition
* Speech recognition
* Scanning
* Digital downloads & transfers

It's another historic turning point in the input technologies evolution. In fact, it may be the last quarter turn at the end of a very long marathon that started in the late 1950s. Now that speech will become truly be ubiquitous, it can finally be universally taught and accepted and assume its place as a tool on par with the ubiquitous keyboard.

PERFORMANCE OF VISTA SR

But what about performance? Can Vista SR compete with the other alternatives? At our first session at NBEA, we had the very group of teachers capable of answering that question in an authoritative way. The session was designed for experienced speech recognition teachers eager to compare products.

Near the end of the session, our casual poll of these expert voice recognition teachers was a resounding YES! Windows Vista got people excited!

The Vista voice recognition instructional materials from the new second edition DigiTools book also performed extremely well. (www.karlbarksdale.com/books.html)

There is a caveat: Microsoft hasn't yet fully developed speech recognition yet for Excel and PowerPoint, and there is a trick to sitting it up that we will explore in a future newsletter. However, the Windows Vista program far outshines its competition when controlling the Windows user interface. The new SHOW NUMBERS command gives complete access. It also does a much better job in dialog boxes and makes full use of Microsoft Word.

EASIER TO TEACH

After three teacher training sessions and a classroom trial taught by Andy and Chris with their students, here is the bottom line; Vista speech is just plain easier to teach--by a long shot. The evidence is building. Andy and Chris are the only teachers I know of that have been teaching Vista Speech (in lieu of Dragon) to their students during the 2006-2007 school year. They can validate this claim. Vista SR is easier to teach and learn than any of its previous competitors! For my part, I have been teaching Dragon training sessions every summer since 1999, and the three Vista sessions I have now been part of have been the easiest and most successful of my tenure.

ACCURACY & COST

Vista SR is very accurate. (Some believe, including me, that it’s more accurate than its primary competitor.) And, Vista SR is free with every new Vista PC. For the price, accuracy, and the ease of use, Windows Vista speech recognition has no peer. My final recommendation is to make the switch as soon as it is practically possible, which means when you upgrade your computers to Windows Vista in Microsoft Office 2007.