VoRecOne

Review (03/1990)

Have you ever wished you could just tell your Amiga what you wanted it to do? With Impulse's new VoRecOne, you can do just that.

VoRecOne is a small blue box that gives your Amiga voice-recognition capabilities.

Plug it into the joystick port and you can give your Amiga commands simply by picking up the included microphone and speaking into it.

You have to train the VoRecOne software to recognize your voice. It only knows the commands you teach it, but training is easy. You just give the command a name, select Train from the menu, and repeat the word until the software has recognized it.

VoRecOne can perform a number of actions in response to your voice commands. For example, you can have it execute a CLI command. You could say "directory drive 1" to get a listing of the files on DF1:. It can also respond verbally using the Amiga's built-in speech synthesizer, play a digitized sound, or execute an ARexx macro.

The VoRecOne software can manipulate menus and gadgets in other programs. For example, you can create a VoRecOne macro that will print a document from within your word processor. Even mouse movements can be voice-controlled.

My initial experiments only achieved about a 50-percent recognition rate, but I found that if I spoke in a robotic monotone, doing my best impression of the built-in Amiga speech device, the VoRecOne would recognize my words over 90 percent of the time. The only problem with the recognition is that when it gets a word wrong, it will perform the action for the word it thought you said. If you say "print" and it thinks you said "quit," you're dumped out of the program.

Do you need VoRecOne? Probably not But it's a must for the gadget collector. For me, it's worth it just to see the looks on my friends' faces when I tell the Amiga, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL" and it responds with a digitized voice from 2001: A Space Odyssey saying, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."