Voice Xpress Professional 4

Judging by the promotional material for Lernout & Hauspie's Voice Xpress Professional 4, if you're a PA or a secretary your days are numbered. It's explicitly aiming this product at the busy professional who barely has time to sit down at a desk, let alone exchange small talk with his (or her) secretary. Instead, Lernout & Hauspie would like you to dictate either directly into your PC, or use a digital speech recorder while on the move.

Of course, it would defeat the software's purpose if it took too long to teach Voice Xpress how you spoke, and it claims training times of just six minutes. This is little different from both ViaVoice Pro Millennium Edition (reviewed p187) and NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4 (reviewed issue 62, p214), but unlike its two main competitors Voice Xpress automatically points out that if you initially get poor recognition, you should do extra training.

As it turned out, in my case its warnings were entirely justified - and in order to give the product a fair trial, I trained it for 20 minutes. Despite this, it could only manage a recognition rate of 83 per cent using a pre-recorded WAV file, which compared unfavourably against the 90.2 per cent achieved by NaturallySpeaking. It lags even further behind IBM's ViaVoice, which scored 92.1 per cent on the same texts. Voice Xpress also failed to match its rivals when it came to the UK-specific vocabulary included in the texts. For instance, it transformed 'Andy Cole' into 'and the coal'.

Thankfully, it's easy to make corrections, by issuing the Correct command followed by the word you wish to change. A shortlist of numbered choices appear, and you then say 'Take' followed by the appropriate number. If the right word isn't listed, you can either spell it out or type it into the space provided. Whichever method you choose, the correction is then incorporated into your voice profile. If you find that a word or command is consistently misrecognised, you can specifically train Voice Xpress to learn that word.

Its intelligence for capitalising proper names is another area where Voice Xpress slips behind ViaVoice and NaturallySpeaking. Depending on context, both of the latter two programs automatically capitalise surnames if they follow a first name, but Voice Xpress was more inconsistent. Although this may seem like a small point, having to remember to capitalise names while dictating does make it more difficult to use.

In many other ways, Voice Xpress is relatively easy to use, and it has had a number of enhancements over previous releases. There may not be an animated assistant to help you as there is in ViaVoice, but the five-minute tutorial gives a good introduction to the basics of speech recognition. There's also a comprehensive Recognition Advisor for tips on how to improve your recognition accuracy.

Lernout & Hauspie has also concentrated on integration with Microsoft Office 97 and 2000. For example, you can enter basic calculations and format cells in Excel, command PowerPoint to go to the seventh slide, and check spelling or bullet paragraphs in Word. Although you can dictate directly into any Windows application that accepts text, this integration does help to make the program a good all-round product rather than just a dictation tool. In addition, Voice Xpress enhances Windows' Calculator, Clock and Address Book to accept voice commands, as well as allowing you to navigate around the Desktop by voice.

Although this is the Professional edition of Voice Xpress, there's little feel of luxury about the 'deluxe' headset. Its build quality isn't up to that of ViaVoice's, for instance, and this is most obvious when it comes to the placing of the microphone. For best recognition quality, the microphone should be around a thumb's width away from the side of your mouth, but any sort of knock pushes it out of position.