Chapter 6: Talking to Your Tablet PC

In This Chapter

• Teaching Tablet PC to understand you

• Adjusting your microphone

• Dictating your content

• Making corrections

• Adding pronunciations

• Speaking commands to your software

Speech recognition is a mixed blessing. It's just as cool as can be - suddenly you're behaving like a starship captain who can just speak commands into thin air and have the computer do your bidding. (You know - you say, 'Computer, summarize the profits from merchandising the products of the following mega-movie franchises . . .' and it does!) But on the negative side, speech recognition technology is still in a somewhat clunky, infantile stage of its evolution.

That clunkiness means that the best speech-recognition technology can hear you about as well as you can hear someone speaking to you when both your neighbors are mowing their lawns and your dog is barking. A word such as 'meow' might come out as 'right now.'

I once spoke the words 'Don't forget to do a quality check,' and the Tablet PC recorded 'Dover get to college to.' (Actually, some of the attempts speech recognition makes can be pretty funny - and possibly the basis of a new board game.)

But the good news is that speech recognition is improving all the time, and as you use it, both you and the technology will get smarter.