What do Word XP and 2003 have that 2007 doesn’t, apart from a customisable interface? The answer is speech recognition.

Instead of pounding a keyboard with a bizarre layout designed in 1872, you can talk into a microphone and the words appear on the screen as you do so. At least in theory.

For a start the feature is only available in the ‘Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English (US), and Japanese language versions of Microsoft Office’, and only in the US English version is it possible to give spoken menu and toolbar commands.

If you install the speech component from Office 2003 setup, then go to Tools, then Speech, you’ll be prompted to calibrate the microphone. At the same time you’ll be told that dictation is not available because of your keyboard language ­ assuming this is UK English. You can, however, switch to US English from Windows Control Panel, Regional and Language options or the Windows language toolbar.

After you’ve taken a lengthy training exercise you’ll find the good news is that you can, in fact, dictate with the UK keyboard layout active, but the results are disappointing, and you’ll find dictation and correction far slower than even the most cack-handed two-finger typing. The main problem seems to be that the recognition engine is designed for US English.

The Great Dictator
So, this month we’re going to take the unusual step of discussing Windows Vista in the Word Processing column. Why? Because Vista has built-in speech recognition, which is not only available to Word or other compatible text-entry applications but which really works. It’s very easy to set up, too. You just plug in the headset, start the speech program and follow the wizard. When prompted, do take the time to print out the tables of commands from the Help file ­ click the ‘Show all’ button first. Take the tutorial as well ­ it’s mercifully brief but very informative.

Speech is buried away under Start, All Programs, Accessories, Ease of Access, Windows Speech Recognition, so you may want to pin this to the Start menu or add it to the Quicklaunch Toolbar. There is also an option to have it start with Windows. Once you have it configured and running you say ‘Start listening’. And it does. If you’re stuck, and didn’t print out the command tables, then say ‘what can I say’ and the help reference will appear.

Vista’s speech recognition is system-wide, but I’m going to concentrate on its performance in Word 2007. You can dictate text at almost normal speaking rate and if it makes a mistake you say ‘correct that’. You’ll see a numbered list of alternatives ­ say the number of the correct word followed by ‘OK’ and the correction will be made. If you don’t see the right word, just say it again or spell it out. It learns as it goes, so the more time you spend with it the better it gets.

As well as dictating you can navigate the document, select, copy, delete and paste text and issue Word commands in a variety of ways. For example, ‘Click Insert’ will open the Insert ribbon or ‘Press F5’ summon the search dialogue, or ‘Save’ do just that. Alternatively you can say ‘Show Numbers’ and numbers will appear overlaid on all controls or buttons in the current window.

Say a number followed by OK to get at the contents. There all sorts of other clever touches ­ you can insert punctuation by saying ‘comma’ or ‘full stop’ and capitalise a word, for example, by saying ‘Capitalise word’. Word will highlight all the instances of the word and number them, say the number and OK and that instance will be capitalised. All this is seamless ­ you don’t have to do anything but speak, as it’s smart enough to distinguish between commands and dictated text.

There is much more than we have room to print and a lot of it is very intuitive, such as ‘new paragraph’ or ‘go to word’. I’d go as far as to say it’s the first really compelling reason I have found for upgrading to Vista and the first time I’ve used speech recognition software that really works. Finally, Vista’s speech recognition also works with Notepad and Wordpad (see screen 4), but, sadly, we couldn’t get Open Office 2.2 to accept dictation.