Some General Speech Recognition Tips
By Bill Mann

Do you talk to your computer and expect it to respond? If so, I hope you're taking advantage of the Tablet PC's built-in speech recognition capabilities. If you are doing speech recognition on your Tablet, I've got some tips that can help you get better results. Here are some of my favorites:

• Be sure to pronounce your words clearly, but don't separate them into distinct syllables. Modern speech recognition system works better with whole words and sentences, rather than discrete syllables.
• Dictate an entire paragraph at a time. Once you're done with the paragraph, use your pen to go back and make corrections. Since you can jump to any point in the paragraph instantly using the pen, this is a mighty efficient way to use the combination of voice and pen.
• Always add specialized words to the dictionary. Adding words that the Tablet PC doesn't recognize to the dictionary greatly increases the accuracy of speech recognition
• Always add the name of your company and of your boss to the dictionary. Few things are more embarassing at work than to misspell (or have your speech recognition system misspell) you company name or the name of your boss!
• Conserve electrical power and processing power by turning off the speech recognition software when you're not using it.
• Don't start talking until the word Listening appears in the status area and you hear a tone notifying you that the system is ready to listen.
• Don't let anyone else use speech recognition when they're signed on to your Tablet PC under your user name. The system will try to recognize their voice, and begin training itself to recognize them. This will likely reduce the system's accuracy when recognizing your voice.

These simple steps can easily increase the odds of your Tablet actually doing what you want when you talk to it.

More on eBooks

Last week's article on eBooks prompted some Buzz readers to send links to their favorite eBook sites. Here are some additional sites you can search for free eBooks:

• Microsoft Reader Catalog of eBooks (http://www.mslit.com/default.asp?mjr=FRE). This site has over 1500 free books, all of which are already in Microsoft Reader format.
• Blackmask Online (http://www.blackmask.com/) offers several thousand free eBooks, most of which are available in Microsoft Reader format.
• Baen (http://www.baen.com/library) is giving away a number of its Science Fiction and Fantasy eBooks.

Our thanks go to Mark Payton and Stephan Hodges for pointing us to these sites.

TabletPCBuzz has hit the mark of 3,000 members. Thanks to all out there who are registered and have been a part of making this site grow. To celebrate this milestone we are having a contest, with prizes including Vision Object's MyScript Notes and PhraseExpress. Thanks to both of those companies for contributing to this contest. Watch the site tonight and tomorrow morning for the details on how to win!

We are looking for more of your user questions to answer in our Ask the Buzz column! If you have a question about anything related to Tablet PCs, or have a problem with your Tablet PC you just can't figure out, send us an e-mail at spg@tabletpcbuzz.com and let us know your question!

Recently some people have reported that the address that this newsletter is sent from (info@tabletpcbuzz) has been bouncing their e-mail back to them. I'm working on trying to figure out what is going on, in the meantime if you need to get ahold of us please use my direct e-mail address - spg@tabletpcbuzz.com. Thanks!

This week's poll question:
User assistance polls (Continued) & What factor is most important to you when choosing a Tablet PC?
Vote now at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com!

A new offering from Motion...again. This time with the recently announced ULV Intel Pentium-M 1GHz processor:

"Motion Computing today announced immediate availability of the industry's first Tablet PC to incorporate the power and wireless mobility of Intel(R) Centrino(TM) mobile technology running at 1 GHz.

Motion's newest M1300 Tablet PC model is also the company's fastest, running about eight percent faster than the ultra-low-voltage 900MHz Intel Centrino-based M1300, and up to approximately 40 percent faster than its M1200 Tablet PC."

Maybe it's time for Motion to adopt some sort of sub-model naming scheme. Could this be called the M1300i, for example? Having so many fast-changing specs in a single-named model line could lead to customer confusion, especially when they order from resellers and not Motion directly (wait, that's heresy, right?). (Link)