Voice dictation and voice control are a long-time nightmare of PC users, but unlike science fiction movies in which PC always understands speaker, real life applications for voice interfacing to PCs have not always been pleasing in practice.

Recent vendors of voice-dictation software available in English contain

• ScanSoft. Dragon NaturallySpeaking; IBM Via Voice
• Microsoft. Microsoft Office XP and 2003

Though many vendors of voice dictation and control software is smaller than it was some years ago, results are getting best

• Take time to train the software effectively.
• Use a PC with a 1GHz or faster processor and 256MB of RAM or greater.