From what I can see, it is the most prevalently used Mandarin text processor for PCs in Taiwan. For workstations, a keyboard entry program exists, but has no language modeling, so every character must be manually chosen from the list of homonyms. The phonetic system used can be either China's Pin Yin or Taiwan's phonetic system. Potentially, speech recognition for Mandarin can be as fast as for any other language. Acoustic processing is the process of digitizing the incoming speech signal and classifying it into one of the 1345 syllables.
Language modeling then takes the syllable and selects the correct character based on context.
There are several main challenges in designing a viable speech recognition system. One is speaker-independence. Most systems start as speaker-dependent, able to recognize only the person's voice which was used to train it. However, with enough training and creative designing, a system can be made to recognize many people's voices, or the same person's voice with a cold. Another challenge is noise robustness.