L&H Voice Xpress Professional

L&H Voice Xpress Professional

PRO: Easy and fast correction of misrecognized words, excellent numerical recognition

CON: Finicky about command pronunciation, recognition is spotty

At first glance, Lernout & Hauspie's Voice Xpress Professional looks a lot like Dragon's NaturallySpeaking Preferred. But though the $150 Voice Xpress Pro has advantages--it recognizes numbers well and integrates tightly into Office 97 apps--it can't match Dragon's overall accuracy or ability to recognize commands.

Voice Xpress Pro's training process is the longest of all the packages. It took me 50 minutes to read 230 screens of text--lists of commands, spelling exercises, and excerpts from a book about Antarctica (including such tongue twisters as "vulpine Russian glaciologist").

While Voice Xpress Pro recognized most business text, it proved hard of hearing at times. "Westwood Park" became 'west with a park', "June 22nd" became 'June 20 seconds', "quarter" became 'water', and "Stan Miastkowski" came out (mystifyingly) as 'to stand and guest cascade'. It also had real problems with articles and short words (like "a," "the," and "that"). Voice Xpress Pro's occasional recognition problems may be attributable in part to its small (30,000-word) basic vocabulary, about half the size of those in other packages.

Voice Xpress Pro also had trouble recognizing some navigation and desktop-control commands, like "go to the end of the document." I increased dictation accuracy by speaking slowly and enunciating words with unnatural precision. But I had better luck inducing the package to recognize navigation and formatting commands by running words together ("downtwoparagraphs," for example), pausing before and after each command.

On a positive note, Voice Xpress Pro has one of the cleanest ways of correcting its mistakes. Say "correct that," and up pops a list of suggested words. If the right word is there, you say "take" and the number of the correct word, and it's inserted in your document. The product also integrates seamlessly into Microsoft Office 97; unlike with the other packages, there was no delay when working within Office apps. And Voice Xpress Pro shines at numerical entry, letting me create entries in an Excel spreadsheet by saying numbers in an entirely natural manner. But Dragon is considerably better at basic recognition, and as far as navigation and control capabilities go, Voice Xpress can't lay a finger on IBM's Via Voice.