Just a couple of years ago, the PC speech recognition and dictation market saw four key players jostling for position, but today the contest is just between IBM and one other player, Dragon.

ViaVoice Web is a voice recognition package designed especially for Internet users. It links into email programs, both Netscape and Microsoft Web browsers, chat programs and includes special Web oriented jargon to make it much easier to take voice recognition onto the Internet.

Its over a year since IBM released its major update to its ViaVoice family of speech dictation packages. At its core, ViaVoice has always been impressive.

Voice recognition is the holy grail of computing: the ability to walk around your room and dictate to your PC is an attractive one, however the real experience with voice recognition is far different.

Getting your PC to meaningfully accept voice commands or dictation has been a benchmark for futuristic computing since time immemorial. Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS for short) has been a leader in the field for some time now, and is rapidly becoming devoid of competition.