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.

Voice E-mail is an add on to Maxiworks E-Mail Express (sold with the program). Priced at $32.95 without a microphone, or $49.95 with, there is no doubt that the program delivers what youd want in an email package, but there is a lack of sophistication thats generally expected in todays programs.

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.

Part 1 of our VoIP product and services roundup includes: MyNetFone, Broadbandphone, Skype, Firefly, BBP Global and Chat-Cord.

Voice recognition software has always been considered to be a rather curious product...

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.

A fully digital multitrack audio production suite for under $2,500

Take the Xiro internals, pop them in a groovy egg-shaped casing, lose the dodgy controls, put one-touch buttons where they are needed, add a quality pair of headphones with built in volume control and what do you have? The Apacer BP300.

The Korean-made JNC SSF-70 is very cool, neat and bursting with goodies – it comes with 128MB of MP3 storage plus voice recording plus a built in FM scanning tuner plus a built in auto-charging battery – all in a tiny tube designed to hang ‘round your neck on a special earphone/neck strap combo.

We've all had the experience of speaking to someone on the phone and having their voice drowned out by the background noise. The problem is usually accentuated with mobile phones and public telephones which by their very nature are prone to this annoyance.

While there is not yet any conclusive evidence to show that mobile phone radiation is harmful, there are cases underway in the US where people are suing for brain damage allegedly caused by mobile phones...

Creative’s exclamation mark naming returns in a webcam that really doesn’t deserve it.

Features voice recording and an FM tuner. The device can be fiddly to operate, and the LCD screen doesn't display any track information other than the title. There is no playlist management, and no directory structure for your tracks. Voice recording allows the sampling rate to be set up to 48,000Hz.

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.

Mobile phones have become powerful and flexible office tools, but there's still one area that's dated - the screen. Trium's Eclipse aims to remedy this, by combining the usual spread of phone features with a 120 x143 pixel 256-colour screen. But do you really need it?

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.

Type: Soft phoneWeb: www.skype.com

This player has its own speaker which would be handy for instant playback of voice recordings. There is 128MB storage on board, with a MMC card slot, located in the battery compartment. The headphones clip over your ear, and are quite comfortable to wear.

The JNC has a reasonable range of features, including FM radio and voice recording, although no capacity for storage expansion. It can be also used as removable storage, for any file type. The software includes a simple tool to format the device, a firmware upgrade utility and RealOne Player Gold. There is no support for playlists, however, unless created within the player itself.

Super portability is definitely the way of the future and Rome's Ultrasm combined MP3/voice recorder takes a step in that direction.