Microsoft has made available an add-on to Vista’s Windows Speech Recognition (Windows Speech Recognition Macros) that allows you to set up your own voice commands that will be performed when you say specified phrases. I was quite excited about this because I was missing this facility from Dragon Naturallyspeaking. Unfortunately, I can’t get it to work. I can create and save macros, but when I say the phrase that’s supposed to run the macro all it does is type the phrase literally.

Never mind, thanks to another blog (Rob’s Rhapsody), I found a way of doing what I want using shell scripts. I can get any script file to run by simply saying, “Start…” followed by the name of the .vbs file.

This really is excellent! Now I’ve got all the features I used in Naturallyspeaking without having to pay the £100 for the upgrade to a Vista compatible version. I don’t mind having to pay for an upgrade, but the price Nuance is charging for the upgrade is the same as Amazon charges for the full version. I feel Dragon users who have upgraded for many years should get a better deal than that. Now that such excellent speech recognition software is available for no extra charge in Vista there’s no need for new users of speech recognition to pay for third-party products.