"Most of the problem is in the software, no question. A lot of very smart people have worked very hard on this and it's still not perfect: not even close. Plus, most of these systems require you to wear a headset, since the microphones were so poor that they had to all but stick the mic in your mouth to pick up anything. It reflects the low quality of the microphones. Not to mention it's annoying to wear those things. "

" and Andrea Electronics have teamed up to alleviate some of this mess. SoundMAX, an Analog Devices company, makes audio chips for PC motherboard. Its CODECs offer Dolby Digital 5.1 sound quality, providing far better sound output than your standard AC97 audio chip. Andrea makes microphones and software to optimize speech recognition and voice command software. "

"Now, the SoundMAX chips offer beautiful, digital sound. As most hardcore gamers know, if your motherboard comes with on-board audio, the first thing you do is throw in a Sound Blaster and disable the onboard audio in the BIOS, because that AC97 audio is terrible. SoundMAX Cadenza is every bit as rich in sound as the Sound Blaster Audigy, but what I really wanted to test out was the speech recognition. "

"Together, these two products make a very good team for speech input and command of a computer. I was sent a PC with the SoundMAX chip on the motherboard and an Andrea "

"I was impressed with its clarity at voice command recognition, and the fact that you didn't need to wear a headset. The unit actually has two microphones built in, as the picture on the above link shows, and sits on top of your monitor. "

"Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) is one of the new features coming in the Orcas version of Visual Studio. LINQ lets you use a SQL-Like syntax to work with objects, relational databases, or XML"

"A bigger development team shouldn't
... read the whole article