Embedded systems have a very wide range of potential uses, and they're technically easier to pull off than full 'dictation' systems, which aspire to let the user say anything he might otherwise enter on a keyboard.

This ranges from the familiar speech options in voice-mail systems ('To keep holding forever, please press or say 'two'') to hand-held devices that will record spoken appointments or phone numbers. People within the computing industry are mainly excited about the business potential of 'embedded' voice-recognition technology. It doesn't do what I dream of, yet, but it does do important things well. Hardened by this experience, I hesitate to say what I'm about to, but here it is: the great new version may have arrived - or at least a significantly better version. The demo person would start talking about the great new version that would be available next year. But if someone in the audience asked to see the computer handle a different phrase, or if someone with a different voice tried the same phrase, the system would be stumped. At the shows the creator of each new system would carefully utter a phrase, which the computer would faithfully render on its screen.

The demonstrations I saw at computer shows, starting in the mid-1980s, left me with the impression that the speech-text barrier in technology was as formidable as the blood-brain barrier long seemed to be in medicine. For years I despaired that such a machine would ever exist.

Speech to text for pc