They overlooked it during demonstrations of Office, for they considered it to be unreliable. The speech recognition was a noticeable omission from the demonstrations of Office 10. Ms Gurry says it wasn't demonstrated since it's difficult to predict in advance the acoustics of a room and hardware such as microphones. There have been rumblings from Office 10 beta testers about the quality of the speech recognition, though Ms Gurry says it is equal to, if not better than, many of the offerings on the market at the moment. She says Microsoft has chosen to include both straight dictation, and command and control editing speech functions, though the two can't operate together.
Users instead choose to use dictation or command and control and can switch between the two modes.
What we're trying to do is both really well, separately. The languages that will be available initially, are International English, Chinese and Japanese. Microsoft is considering including a microphone with Office Suite, and considers the newest edition to be its best so far. It's definitely not going to be Star Trekkish, or change the way that the majority of people work today. Microsoft is not very proud of their Voice Recognition, and the beta testers aren t either.