And then there were two. With the demise of the Philips and L&H products, the general market for voice recognition software is now being carved up by Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 and IBM Viavoice Release 10.

Both products have come a long way, and offer accurate recognition, particularly when paired with today's crop of 2GHz+ PCs with CPU cycles which are going to waste.

There are just two versions of Viavoice 10: the entry-level Standard Edition and the more expensive Pro. Both feature an improved recognition engine and better control over background noise sensitivity.

As before, they offer direct dictation into most Windows apps, 'natural language' command and control of a more limited range of apps, plus a text-to-speech synthesiser if you're keen on a Dalek reading back your prose.

The £60 extra you pay for the Pro version also buys you a more sophisticated Andrea USB mic headset, support for macros and transcription from a list of digital memo recorders.

While the software installation took rather a long time - a good seven minutes or so - the enrolment times continue to shrink. This release asks you to read just one paragraph by way of enrolment, but it's worth spending 15 minutes or so reading out the sample texts to achieve top recognition rates.

It will also want to trawl through your existing documents to look for words to add to its vocabulary - we tried limiting it to a couple of small folders, but it found over 1,300 words it wanted to add, which is a relatively slow chore. Nevertheless, within 30 minutes Viavoice 10 was ready for business.

We installed it on a 1GHz Athlon PC with 512MB of Ram, running Windows XP Pro. This was powerful enough to deliver rapid recognition speeds using Speakpad, but when running larger apps, such as Word 2002, there was a noticeable performance hit when Viavoice was running.

DETAILS

Price: £99.99 (£85.10 ex VAT); Standard Edition £39.99 (£34.03 ex VAT)

Contact:IBM 01475 555 047
www-3.ibm.com/software/speech/uk

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Windows 98SE, ME, XP Home
266MHz processor
64MB of Ram
500MB of free hard disk space
16bit sound card with a mic jack