Voice Xpress Professional

Voice recognition software has evolved to the point where it is actually usable. From monumentally primitive beginnings, you can now dictate to your PC and enjoy complete control over it. However, just like handwriting recognition systems, you have to play to the software's strengths to get the most out of it - the test of good voice recognition software isn't usually the level of recognition itself, but how natural the process is. If you're forced to use the program's own shorthand rather than simple terms and expressions, it's simply not usable enough. The end goal is plug-and-play speech recognition software, but that's still a long way off in the future.

Lernout and Hauspie's Voice Xpress Professional is a continuous speech recognition system which enables you to dictate in conversational language, running words together in your usual style, while still attaining a high level of accuracy. Providing you devote a few hours to reading from the prepared texts, you can expect to get up to about 90 per cent accuracy within your first day. If you ignore the urge to try and change a lot of words straight away, it's possible to rattle off a piece of text far quicker than you ever could by typing.

Like most speech recognition systems, Voice Xpress uses a basic voice dictionary which is augmented by your own particular speech patterns. The initial enrolment process is inevitably both tedious and irritating, but L&H has at least tried to make the process slightly more bearable by including a vaguely entertaining piece of text to read from. In my case, enrolment took about one hour, but if the dictation suite likes your voice patterns it is possible to complete it in as little as half an hour.

There are two main ways to use Voice Xpress - either with the built-in SpeechPad application (essentially WordPad with knobs on) or with your standard Windows applications, such as Microsoft Office. In either case, it's possible to control the whole process of opening an application, entering data, saving that data, correcting everything and either finally saving or printing, with your voice alone. Having used all of the major voice recognition systems, including the high-end Dragon Naturally suite and IBM ViaVoice, I'd have to say that Voice Xpress is both the most effective and the easiest to use.

General-purpose control of your PC is now entirely feasible thanks to the excellent 'Say What You See' feature. Imagine you want to use one of your more esoteric menu tools within L&H: you'd simply say what's on-screen such as 'Insert' to open the menu and then 'Date' for the menu choice. After a little practice, I found I could control pretty much every aspect of the Windows 98 desktop. Of course, no speech system is infallible (yet), but it's certainly very usable, which is more than can be said for my experience of ViaVoice.

One of the neater features is the 'Talk and Go' system, whereby you dictate into, say, a Sony Walkman, plug it into your PC via the line-in socket on your sound card, and have Voice Xpress dictate your text. I tried this out on a Sony MiniDisc recorder and achieved very reasonable results. On my test machine, a Pentium/II 333MHz with 128Mb of RAM, recognition speeds were excellent and easily comparable with Dragon's NaturallySpeaking Professional.

On the down side though, Voice Xpress seems to suffer some stability problems and in my case required a large patch before it would function at all. In its box-fresh format, I found it either refused to run or crashed soon after loading - the upgrade that I downloaded from the L&H Web site (UKVXPro202bUp) cured it completely in Windows 98, but I never did manage to get it working in NT 4 with Service Pack 4. However, I've experienced similar problems with all speech recognition suites, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional in particular, and it's something that the software developers - most of whom make some use of the flaky Microsoft Speech API - really should investigate.