It has taken me quite a bit of time to teach Microsoft's Speech Recognition enough medical vocabulary to enable me to use it to dictate office visit notes. I have on occasion used it to dictate long emails, but for the most part, it serves a very limited role and it is not enough of a reason for me to remain in Windows instead of switching to Linux on my dual boot netbook. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful that I have it working. In fact, it is probably Microsoft's greatest recent failing in not developing it further. They have had it available for years—hidden from view.

Now that Google has voice recognition built into Chrome, it will be but a short time before they enable it everywhere, not just for searching. It seems to work surprisingly well for dictating one sentence at a time—perfect for searching on Google. Currently, speech recognition in Chrome is annoying for dictating paragraphs at a time. But knowing how methodical Google is as a company in bringing out new technology, I am sure it will not be long before it is incorporated into GMail and Google Docs. In five years it may seem unnatural to type an email. Microsoft will probably loose yet another area to Google where they could have capitalized their market if the product were fully developed.

I continue to love my little netbook, the Acer Aspire One 722. I upgraded to Lubuntu 12.10 from 12.04 with again zero problems. Well, I still have not gotten the microphone to work, but I have not tried too hard to figure it out either. I am using the 64bit version—it runs great on the lowly AMD C-60 processor. I still have approximately 5 hours of battery time. Wonderful!