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Control your PC with your voice

// December 27th, 2008 // Software

A few days ago a friend of mine got a new PC. As any person with a new PC that has 4GB of ram and a dual code CPU he installed Vista. One feature that vista has and XP hasn’t is Voice Control. So he was telling me what this feature can actually do. This was when I remembered that XP can do the same thing.

So I went to google and searched for a voice control software. I knew about one, but I decided to search for more. So, after 15 minutes of searching I had two posible candidates. KM Remote and SayNow. I installed them both and started talking all by myself int he room. Here is how they worked.

KM Remote: A really nice software. You can configure it to start applications and simulate key press. When you first configure a new command you have to say 4 times in the mic the command so that the software will recognise your voice. For example, I made a command that lunches Winamp and made it recognise when I say “Start Winamp”. At first I was very pleased with it. It did what I told it to do about 50% of the times (the other 50% it did not do anything). The problem is that it did not know how to maximeze/minimize a window or other stuff like that. But still I thought it was cool since I did not want to control every aspect with my voice…just to lunch fast different applications. The problems started when I moved my laptop somewhere else. I wen to by girlfriend’s home and I took my laptop with me. I wanted to show her the new software, but…it did not work. It did not recognized my voice. The problem was that the software analyses my voice with the recodings I did when I configured the commands. I made this in my room. When moving to the other room (a bigger one with a litle eco) the patterns did not match anymore.

SayNow: This has a few nice features. You can have an avatar that can talk with you (different voices can be selected) and it also has commands like: Maximizewindow, MinimizeWindow,  Cancel,  OK,  Save As,  Open File,  etc.  Some commands don’t work all the time…but in most applications they do. You can also configure new commands (like launch an application or visit a website).  It is a need peace of software. But, this to has limitation. Even after I did the Voice Recognition Training it still did not respond to all my commands and the software has bugs: sometimes it kept doing commands without me saying anything and the only solution was to manually close the program. Also, in most of the cases, it was faster to just hit the OK or Cancel button than to say “Computer” (to get the software attention to know I am going to say a command) “Cancel”. One thing it did very wellwas “Close Application” or “Close window”. This software also has dication, but I found it very bad and in very few cases it actually wrote what I was telling him (remind me of  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1123221217782777472 ).

So, as a conclusion, voice recognition software still have a long way to go until they can actually do what we can with a few simple and fast mouse clicks.