Advances in Speech Recognition

. IBM and Dragon Systems have the most popular programs out there that let you speak into a microphone and have what you say appear as text on screen. IBM's William OsborneÂ…

"Well what we did last year, when we announced continuous speech recognition, we legitimatized speech as a technology. During the past year we've been growing it, improving on that technology and what we're going to see over the next two to five years is the technology is going to be put into lots of different applications, not just dictation."

For instance, in your car. Andrea Electronics is working on specialized microphones for that kind of thing. Douglas Andrea says it's called DSDAÂ….

"Which is a multiple of microphones that can actually focus on the voice of the driver, eliminating all the background noise so you have very accurate speech recognition in a high noise environment."

One of the handiest microphones we've seen for use with ordinary speech recognition is the Philips SpeechMike Pro. Philips' Matt Van Vleet...

"Our mike actually has a high quality microphone, a trackball, and a speaker built into it."

The ergonomic design is easy to work with. Philips has also entered the speech recognition software arena with a 39 dollar program called FreeSpeech 98. You can try it for free before you buy it at freespeech98.com