An amateur video of someone trying to use Vista’s Speech Recognition to navigate in Firefox and IE.

An amateur video of a user trying to use Vista’s speech recognition to create a Perl script.

A news report about a Microsoft Windows Vita Speech Recognition demo that didn’t go quite the way they would have wanted.

When you play an audio file in Windows Vista, voice commands may be unintentionally issued to Windows Speech Recognition. This problem may also occur if an audio file is played when you visit a Web site.

After you opt in to Automatic Learning in Windows Vista, you experience the following symptoms:

• The Handwriting recognition personalization tool does not gather some English text from the message bodies of e-mail messages in Windows Mail.
• The Handwriting recognition personalization tool incorrectly gathers non-English text from the message bodies of e-mail messages in Windows Mail.

You experience this problem when you use Windows Vista on a Tablet PC.

In some versions of Windows Vista, when you open the Speech Recognition Options item in Control Panel, the user interface items are not in the correct language. Additionally, no configuration features are available under Configure your Speech Recognition experience. Therefore, you cannot configure the Speech Recognition feature.

A long video of someone using Firefox, and then IE7 to go to a website using speech recognition. Firefox did a decent job, IE7 was horrible. It is comical to watch, especially when you need to spell something with the letter ‘N’! Keep reading →

More info on the concept of using speech recognition to hack your Vista. Keep reading →

The Microsoft Security Response Center Blog has a post that describes a potential issue with Vista’s speech recognition feature. They say it’s nothing to worry about, the stars would have to align to take advantage of it. So can the ‘hackers’ find a way to make it work? Keep reading →