First impressions of Vista speech recognition - Start Listening!

Bottom line:  Fantastically cool.

I spent some time over the weekend playing around with the new Speech Recognition (SR) features in Windows Vista.  My setup includes a Logitech USB headset with noise canceling microphone connected to my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC running Windows Vista Ultimate. 

Performance has been outstanding - I haven't really noticed any significant impact on application speed while running SR. 

Learning the basics of Vista SR has gone fairly smoothly so far.  You can control SR by saying things like "undo that" or "start Outlook".  All in all, the voice commands are basically what you'd expect to have to say to your computer to get it to do what you want (minus the 4 letter words, perhaps).  Dictation is also very nice.  For some reason (I haven't looked up the specifics of the programming constraints yet), it wouldn't work with the Community Server text editor, so I couldn't dictate this blog post as I had intended.

Combined with the Natural Language Search feature, you can say things like, "Start. Holy Grail.  Search the Internet" or "Find all pictures from 2006".  Pretty slick!