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. However, the year-old Millennium Edition (the Web edition was reviewed issue 27, p113) was let down by its huge appetite for processing power and resources. It also lacked support for both Windows 2000 and USB microphones.

ViaVoice Professional 8 now supports Windows 2000 while all versions now support USB microphones. A new bug fix/upgrade facility has been implemented via a Web-based service. However, ViaVoice 8 still has a hunger for power with IBM stating minimum processor requirements of 300MHz. In this day and age an average PC may be above this specification, but dont forget the large number of people who use perfectly functioning but moderately old notebooks. For Windows ME users, a technical peculiarity means that IBM recommends no less than a minimum of 600MHz processing power. Whats more, IBM was as confused as us as to what caused it.

Our test machine is a Windows 98 SE system with 128MB RAM and a 450MHz processor. While recognition speed was commendably quick, dictating into Microsoft Word, for example, there was a noticeable hesitancy or stickiness in the response of ordinary menu commands. Once again there was a familiar and rather forbidding feeling that ViaVoice was throttling the entire system.

On the other hand, recognition accuracy was very good right from the start. Like its rivals, ViaVoice employs a reduced time enrolment feature. That said, the test system took about 20 minutes of reading plus five minutes of calculation time before dictation into documents could commence. This is slightly longer than weve come to expect from other packages. IBM says system performance is evaluated by the installation software and enrolment times and accuracy capabilities are correspon-dingly set. The faster your PC is, the shorter the enrolment time will be and the more accurate it should be.

A top-quality Andrea NC 61 headset microphone is supplied. Even with a simple ISA 16-bit Sound Blaster compatible sound card, the audio setup Wizard indicated an excellent audio quality rating. Unfortunately, this latest version of ViaVoice seems to have become annoyingly sensitive to extraneous sounds in between dictated words and this can cause spurious errors.

New features in version 8 include a more accurate recognition engine, complemented by an expanded vocabulary of 150,000 words plus an additional 21,000 proper and place names. A small but potentially useful feature is the ability to add voice-command bookmarks throughout a document, while a related new feature is the ability to create document templates using Microsoft Word - useful for creating commonly used documents like faxes, letters and memos.

ViaVoice does have a natural language command interface controlling certain aspects of applications like Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook. However, compared to Lernout and Hauspies VoiceXpress Pro 5 natural language parser, its fairly limited. Luckily, context-sensitive listings of available voice commands are readily to hand. Direct dictation into most Windows applications is supported, while key applications like members of the Microsoft Office family and Internet Explorer benefit from extended commands.

To build up a high level of accuracy, you need an intuitive and easy-to-use correction strategy. ViaVoice can play back very clear recordings of what you actually said - unlike VoiceXpress. This means that theres very little excuse for making erroneous corrections, which is good news for building up overall accuracy. Theres also a handy correction box that pops up when you highlight a word or phrase using either your mouse or the relevant voice command. As soon as its highlighted, that word or phrase is instantly played back to you in your own voice. However, if the suggested alternatives for the word or phrase youre trying to correct are over a certain length, theyre confusingly truncated by the relatively small confines of the correction box. If the root of the phrase is the same, you wont know which option to choose. Coming back to that over-sensitive microphone once more, as you type in a correction, noisy key clicks can introduce spurious changes to the correction field.

ViaVoice Professional 8 is more coherent, accurate and certainly faster than its Millennium Edition predecessor, lying somewhere in between its two primary competitors, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 5 (reviewed issue 39, p96) and Lernout and Hauspies VoiceXpress Pro 5. The Dragon package has less frills, but is the best - in my opinion - for consistently high-accuracy text dictation. VoiceXpress is less accurate but has a much more powerful natural-language command capability. ViaVoice Professional 8 can only be recommended for users who can provide it with the power it hungers for.