Several months ago my wife and I were out shopping for a Clapper—the product that turns your lights on and off when you clap your hands. We have a lamp that's behind a couch in the corner of our living room. It was such a pain to reach the switch that we decided that we would get a Clapper so we didn't have to crawl over the couch to shut it off. Well, instead of getting a Clapper we got Lamp Commander, a device that lets you turn your lamp on and off and even dim the lights by using your voice. Unfortunately, Lamp Commander doesn't always understand what we're trying to say. I wonder if it notices the frustration in our voices after the fourth attempt to turn the light off?

The speech (command) recognition programs available for the Pocket PC are significantly better than the one for the Lamp Commander, but they are nowhere near the level of accuracy you'd expect from, say, the talking computer on Star Trek. You have to repeat yourself from time to time, and accept that sometimes the wrong contact will be displayed.

Speech recognition: the basics

Speech recognition programs are either "speaker dependent" or "speaker independent." The speaker-dependent programs adjust to the way you speak, which requires a "training" process. The speaker-independent programs attempt to recognize anyone's speech, without benefit of training.

Speaker-dependent programs tend to be smaller, faster, and more accurate than speaker-independent programs. However, they also require more time to learn because you have to train the program to recognize your voice patterns. Voice LookUp, reviewed below, is a speaker-dependent program. Speaker-independent programs are easier to learn and use, but they tend to be larger and require more power. PDsay, reviewed below, is speaker independent.

Speech recognition programs also differ in purpose. Both of the Pocket PC programs I review in this article recognize spoken commands. Both are capable of looking up contacts by name and launching programs. Additionally, one of them has text-to-speech capability ­ it will "speak out" the information you request. However, neither of these programs will translate your speech into text. Current speech-to-text programs are too large and require too much CPU power to be practical for the Pocket PC. They are available for desktop PCs, but even then they use speaker-dependent recognition to improve accuracy and increase speed.

There are a few things about speech recognition on the Pocket PC that you should know:

Speech recognition software requires a great deal of space—Both of these programs occupy over 4 Mb of storage and may require another 4 to 5 Mb of RAM to run.

The quality of the built-in microphones ranges from acceptable to bad—The microphones included in Pocket PCs aren't designed for high-fidelity recording. As a result, the programs have to work hard to recognize your speech. Speak clearly and keep your lips within an inch or so of the microphone.

Support for Pocket PC 2002 isn't fully ironed out—Because Microsoft hasn't officially released the software development kit (SDK) for Pocket PC 2002, there were some definite rough edges when I tested this software on a Pocket PC 2002. Both vendors have committed to addressing Pocket PC 2002 issues as soon as Microsoft releases the SDK.

Let's take a look at two speech recognition programs for the Pocket PC.

Voice LookUp from HandHeld Speech

Voice LookUp, from HandHeld Speech (www.handheldspeech.com), lets you look up contacts and switch applications using voice commands. Its author freely admits that he doesn't invest heavily into developing Voice LookUp's user interface. His efforts are aimed squarely at improving the recognition engine, and this strategy seems to have paid off. Voice LookUp is faster and more accurate than PDsay.