Although I have not tried MS Speech as yet, I have been following the MS Speech Group, and have watched the development with interest.

My only suggestion is to take the best of ViaVoice 10.5 and DNS Pro 8, put them together, and you will have as near to a perfect product as you can get.

I would venture to suggest, as I always have, that ViaVoice is the more user friendly of the two. In my view (and I will be contradicted by the DNS users), it offers greater options for saving words and phrases, a very easy to use correction window, easier macro creating, you can choose the programmes that you want to dictate directly into, makes the deletion of unanted words from the custom vocabulary easy, is more flexible on the position, size and location of the Speecbar and most of the glitches have been ironed out. From an accuracy point of view, the there is very little to differentiate betwee them.

I would presume that the MS Speech development includes being able to dictate into, and command, any programme.

As regards navigation macros, for example in ViaVoice, I made macro where I simply say " speech computing", and this opens Mozzilla Firefox, opens Speech Computing, and goes straight to Recent Posts. Creating this macro took approximately one minute including fine-tuning the timing.

Finally, please bring out the UK English version.
Quentin

I have two aspects that I am hoping for with the upcoming Microsoft Speech.

First, a Medical version, comparable to Dragon Medical 8.0. Hopefully accuracy will be as good with as short a learning curve.

Second, tight integration of Speech with the Tablet Input Panel. I hope it will be very easy and natural to dictate on a slate Tablet, using the pen to turn on and off the microphone, and using the pen to make corrections. Hopefully as one adds new words to the Tablet dictionary via the pen, one will be able to train the word for speech as well, easily and intuitively.

I currently use my Toshiba tablet using Dragon for speech and the TIP for making corrections, which works well but is not tightly integrated at this time. I'm greatly looking forward to Vista, hoping that this will continue to advance these features.

Joe

I do not. My subjective impression was that the responsiveness of Microsoft speech was faster then DragonNaturallySpeaking when using a medium-size vocabulary (I don't know how large the Microsoft vocabulary is).

The demonstration was done on a virtual machine, so it's reasonable to conclude that it would be faster if it was running directly on hardware.

One other thing is that the Microsoft speech product does not have anything like the Dragon results box which gives users a visual clue as to how long recognition is taking, so even when it's very fast, because you can see the progress you still get a sense that time is elapsing.

Another thing I noticed recently is that the Microsoft speech engine (still) doesn't seem to have any dictation support for nonstandard Windows. 

--
Scott W
Speech resources at SpeechWiki
Products at Applied Recognition