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Thanks to Office XP's built-in voice recognition, you can finally have an excuse when your coworkers look at you strangely for talking to your computer. All you need is a microphone plugged in to your PC's sound card and a little training, and you can get work done using your voice. You can dictate letters and e-mail in Word and Outlook, utter numbers to be plonked into Excel, and speak text into PowerPoint presentations and FrontPage, for instance.

But don't get too excited. XP's voice capabilities are limited. You can go only so far with your voice, and then you've got to turn to your keyboard and mouse. To its credit, though, Microsoft highlights its speech-to-text shortcomings up front, both during the initial setup and in the tutorial.

Getting to Know You

To get started, as all voice recognition programs do, Office XP makes you go through a training session to teach the PC your voice patterns. This process involves reading a series of paragraphs aloud for about 4 minutes to familiarize XP with your accent, pronunciation, and intonation.

For ongoing training, there's an eclectic selection of excerpts to choose from, including Aesop's Fables and Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy. The benefit? Additional training helps improve the program's accuracy in recognizing your speech. One gripe: Microsoft doesn't emphasize enough the need to train over time.

If you want to talk in one of the Office apps, you have two modes to choose from, depending on what tasks you want to accomplish. Say "Dictation," followed by your spiel ("Dear Abby..."), and XP turns your mumblings into text on the screen; say "Voice Command," and you can order XP to do some basic formatting (like changing fonts, or italicizing passages) or navigate menus (such as File, Save).

Microsoft claims you can get 80 percent accuracy after the first pass at training. That's a bit generous. In our tests, it took a lot more training to reach such levels. XP did fairly well at recognizing simple words and phrases, but it goofed on picking up polysyllabic words. For example, instead of "San Francisco," it heard "substances go"; "Hello Harry (colon)" became "the low theory cohen." Applications dedicated to speech-to-text dictation, such as Lernout & Hauspie's Dragon NaturallySpeaking or IBM's ViaVoice, will usually filter out sighs and sneezes, but not XP. It picked up such sounds and turned them into gobbledygook. Achoo!

Overall, XP did a good job of obeying menu and punctuation commands, along with other instructions such as "New line," "New paragraph," or "Scratch that." Another plus: Because the voice technology is integrated, XP's speech processing moves swiftly and seamlessly. Stand-alone dictation packages tend to hog your system's memory and can slow everything down. However, XP doesn't offer much beyond rudimentary voice capabilities.

Not Quite Hands-Free

XP forces you to rely on your keyboard and mouse for various things: moving from one Office program to another, editing, plugging in file names, or moving the cursor or chunks of text around. Making corrections by voice is, frankly, tedious. You have to select the misinterpreted word or phrase, click Tools, type the correct spelling, and rerecord yourself saying those words over and over, until XP gets it.

If you want to get a taste of voice recognition--or just give your hands a break from the keyboard--XP's basic voice offerings are worth trying. After all, it comes with the package at no additional charge, and it works, albeit crudely. Microsoft says it's not bundling a microphone with the software. For the best possible results, be sure to get a noise-canceling PC headset; they cost $20 and up.

However, if you get hooked on voice and want it to do more, you're better off coughing up $130 or more for a dictation package from Lernout & Hauspie or IBM.

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