Going through my local computer store’s Software section, looking for a decent Voice Recognition Program I came across Philips FreeSpeech. Being Dutch myself I couldn’t help but feel compelled to at least try it out. I went home and installed the package. After a few minutes of answering standard set-up questions and rebooting once I was greeted by the Philips theme song (It’s getting better all the time...) and was prompted to begin training. After eighteen minutes of reading texts about a variety of subjects, noticing how the text on my window became green when FreeSpeech recognized it (and sometimes read when I didn’t articulate well enough) FreeSpeech told me that I had done enough training to begin using the program, but that more training would help the program achieve better results. Being quite amused by the diversity of quotes that I had to repeat I decided to keep going for another ten minutes. Then it was time for the Grand Test. Peeking at the huge list of available commands I noticed that the items on my Desktop had already been added to it. Very nice. The first try , ’Start Opera’, worked flawlessly, and within seconds I was looking at my Opera window. Then I decided to try something more complicated. ’Open MySQL Control Center’. A cute little balloon popped up telling me to ’Please repeat’. Perhaps the fact that I bought the Dutch version has something to do with it, but I can’t get abbreviations to work at all. I also can’t cite English text. It does try it’s best to intepret it, but it’s mostly Dutch non-sense, so I am confined to typing my MouthShut review, instead of just barking them into my microphone. Too bad. Judging by how the program responds to my Dutch dictates I can say that it’s truly a marvelous program, it has a few glitches, but I am quite sure that those will be ironed out if only I give the program just a bit more training.
All in all it’s a good program for those who can’t afford their own private secretary, but don’t feel like typing a lot. Just watch out when you speak multiple languages!