The speech recognition software industry has experienced more false starts than a steroid-pumped Olympic sprinter. Microsoft famously had its nose bloodied when it tried to demo the speech-to-text capabilities in Vista, at a meeting of financial analysts a while ago. Here the MS demo'er very soon had the smug expression wiped off his face, as the program proceeded to translate his words into "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all". Makes perfect sense to me.

But Nuance seems to think it has finally cracked the problems that have plagued this often unbearably inaccurate and frustrating technology, with its current Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 software. It's 99 percent accurate and requires no training, apparently, and the firm is so confident in the product, that it is now inviting bloggers to trial it and try to compose their entries using it. Judging by the reviews posted on Nuance's site, there are mixed reactions; although it probably depends on what accent you have as to how quickly the software can learn your dialect and the way you dictate.

Now Nuance can apparently translate speech to text at up to 160 words per minute, which is more than three times faster than my typing speed, although with typical bravado I thought I'd take the online test and try to beat Dragon 9. After typing my hardest for a minute, however, I looked up to find my report as follows: "WPM 0; Accuracy 0; With Dragon NaturallySpeaking your speed could increase by INFINITY". I think I forgot to click the cursor in the text box. Doh.