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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Find out how Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 ups the ante in speech recognition.

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Purely because of its size, even the smallest PDA isn’t something you’re likely to feel comfortable holding to your ear as a phone for long periods of time. And, despite its slim curves and great physique, the Xda II is no exception.