Wading through the daily press release pile I’ve discovered that there’s a brand new version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the PC voice recognition program. Voice tech has fallen off the radar screen over the last few years, but according to the nice PR chap today’s speedy processors mean that computers finally have the horsepower for decent, accurate – and crucially, fast – voice-to-text conversion without tedious training.

I’m intrigued by this, because I always saw voice recognition as a potentially brilliant technology that didn’t quite cut it in reality. A review copy is winging its way to me right now, and as ever the resulting review will end up on the .net site. I’ll post a link when it does (assuming Dragon’s decent. If it isn’t, I won’t bother).

True fact: my Dad’s copy of IBM ViaVoice developed a weird quirk, where every time he dictated “new paragraph” it printed “uterus”.