A long time ago (95-96?)  I completely hosed my system installing IBM Via Voice. It was horrendous. Slow. Unpredictable. Apparently it was also uninstallable… or at least when I tried to my machine was reduced to an auto-rebooting disaster. But great news from KDE  dot News (but runs on Gnome too) that a new program called simon has been written to help people with disabilities use their machine without requiring a keyboard. It’s not quite the voice recognition software to replace a keyboard for taking notes, but it’s pretty impressive stuff. There’s a great video there too, the bit that impressed me was controlling Amarok using the grid feature to “click” on an area of the screen.

http://www.kdenews.org/2009/08/22/simon-speech-activated-user-interface-kde

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