Speech recognition has come a long way. I mean, I have tried to talk to my computer for decades, with various degrees of success. Somehow, those chips are just not listening! I started in the early days of ViaVoice, VoiceType, and similar tools, but only recently I’ve come to a mutual understanding (no pun intended) with my computer. About 10 years ago, I remember endless training sessions with some of the old software packages, where I needed hours to read through Mark Twain essays, to finally get to a comprehension rate of about 85%. It was truly painful. A couple of days ago, I ordered a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, to give speech-recognition another try. When the package came I installed the software right away and within about 10 to 15 minutes I was “typing” (that is, speaking) e-mails, blog postings, and any other document with a stunningly low error rate. The total training time was only about five minutes, for each of the two trained profiles, German and English. Way cool.

I wonder how long it will take until some business application vendors start to offer a speech recognition interface. Consider (literally!) asking your computer to “show me all DVD sales in the first quarter 2006 sorted by label grouped by store” or “show me the last 10 orders of Johnny Smith and highlight any backorders” and instead of navigating an OLAP cube’s dimensions, the software instantly shows you the result. Wouldn’t that be convenient? BI vendors out there, talk to me!