This video is absolutely hilarious. Admittedly he is trying to do something that the Vista speech recognition wasn't designed for, but it still made me laugh so hard it started to hurt. It looks to me that under the right conditions and with the right training it would work well for writing letters and other documents, but I honestly still can't see speech recognition taking off in a huge way - a perfectly quiet environment is not something you usually find in the average office.
On Friday at our usual work lunch at Nando's we were discussing the difference in taste between Coke, Coke Zero, and Diet Coke, and the perceived taste difference between soft drinks out of a can and out of a bottle. After much discussion it was resolved that some blind testing had to be done to resolve the issue. Five of us did a blind test using four identical glasses of Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero all out of glass bottles, and Coke out of a can. We found that (a) almost all of us had no trouble discerning "real" Coke (with sugar) and the others; (b) Diet Coke and Coke Zero have a very similar taste but that the slightly unpleasant aftertaste that you get with Diet Coke wasn't as noticeable in Coke Zero, so they aren't quite the same; and (c) there was absolutely no difference between the coke out of a can and out of a bottle, so it must be just the drinking experience that influences the taste perception. Case closed :)
The Opie code is "frozen" at the moment in preparation for the Opie 1.2.3 release which should happen very soon. There's been the suggestion of another minor Familiar release including it (among other things) in the near future as well, which I would definitely support (and try to help with). Actually I'm looking forward to when the freeze period ends so that I can have a look at committing a few bits of code I've been sitting on - such as by external keyboard (kbdd) control stuff.
