Did Victor Borge Predict Voice Recognition Software?

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Although it has been around for more than decade, speech recognition software has never really lived up to its hype. As someone who has dabbled with various incarnations from the major providers, each offering has been one disappointment after another. Consequently, I didn’t think much of a video review entitled Speech Recognition for Bloggers – The Ultimate Guide but I’m glad I took the time to watch, and so will you…

What immediately caught my attention about the review is the author, Jon Morrow, suffers from Muscular Dystrophy and armed with more than a decade of firsthand experience; I couldn’t imagine a more useful perspective. The video is rather long for a review, more than 20 minutes, but it is broken down into several sections that you can skip past if short on time.

In short, Jon concludes that the latest round of voice recognition (VR) software finally meets the hype of years past and is easy enough to use that it works perfectly well for everything from word processing to blogging to tweeting.

If you want to see an example of how it Jon uses VR software in a blogging environment, go to the 15:00 mark in the video. Everything before that is a historical overview of software/hardware development in addition to Jon’s current picks for programs and hardware.

If you aren’t familiar with VR software, one of the more striking elements is the need to vocalize punctuation. It makes me wonder if Victor Borge could have ever imagined that his Phonetic Pronunciation bit would actually end up as something not unlike the practical application of VR software. In fact, that might be a handy way to lure reluctant music directors and other such artists of a certain generation to give VR software a try for blogging (or get those program notes to the marketing department on time!).