Terrible Voice Recognition

A while ago, I thougt that I had contracted a virus on my Windows laptop from work. Unfortunately, there's no chance that I can migrate to a Mac there :-(.

The strangest things were happening on my laptop. Suddenly there appeared strange pieces of text in Word documents, and in e-mails I was writing. My first reaction was that someone was typing along with me.

After scanning my laptop with three virus scanners and using several anti-spyware software suites, it turned out that there was nothing wrong. After that the uninvited pieces of text were gone..... Until yesterday. But this time I had a clue what had happened.

I use the keyboard a lot for copy, and pasting (CTRL-C and CTRL-V). It seems that WINDOWS-V starts voice recognition. I must have pressed the wrong key combination. This key combo starts with a dialog box explaining that the mic needs tuning. I canceled that dialog, but somehow the voice recognition is still being enabled. There's no visual indication that it's running.

It seems that Windows doesn't recognize the Dutch language, and therefor it starts guessing what you say and displays that in the focussed window.

Lame ass Windows functionality if you ask me.......
Posted on February 5, 2007 and filed under Annoying, Microsoft, Operating Systems.