Speech Recognition

Recently I have been fussing with speech recognition under Windows XP (I am not yet a Vista enthusiast [I tried it] and speech support does not ship with XP as it does with Vista). Being a programmer, I was more interested in using speech recognition within my applications than within Word or the operating system itself. I finally found a way to use System.Speech.Recognition (I am a .NET fan) with C# to distinguish between certain given terms. The engine is highly sensitive and often gives false positives, but is pretty deterministic and gets it right most of the time. Increased difference of pronunciation between expected words and the smaller their number, the better the recognizer will operate. Contextual dictionaries are the key to successful non annoying speech recognition.