We’ve always looked at anyone who wants to talk to their computer with deep suspicion, but there must be plenty of them, for in the next release of OS/2 Warp, code-named Merlin, there are built-in speech navigation and dictation capabilities. The speech recognition capabilities in Merlin are claimed to be 95% accurate with a vocabulary of about 10,000 words when you speak like a robot, with a vocabulary of only 1,000 words for normal speech. IBM says it can expand the vocabulary to up to 42,000 words for discreet speech. It will need a SoundBlaster board from Creative Technologies Ltd.
