Desktop platforms Toolkit

Nuggets: Surf the Web with your voice

Justin Pearse ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 01 Dec 1999 13:59 GMT

So it's come up with the Philips Speech Browser, which lets you dump your mouse and surf with your voice. Feeling all benevolent, Philips has made the Speech Browser available as a free 10MB download from its speech processing site .

Trying to overcome the public's wariness of the training times associated with speech technology, Philips claims the software only takes 45 seconds to learn users' speech patterns.

It's based on Philips' FreeSpeech 2000 package and comes equipped with a specialised vocabulary to recognise Internet content displayed on Internet Explorer. There's also a built-in link recognising system. This means that if a link is not readable by voice it can be activated by saying a number displayed next to it. All the common Internet commands, such as back and refresh, can be activated via voice commands.

So chuck away your keyboard and mouse, sit back, and relax while you surf. Or so say Philips.

I love gadgets so take me to the Nuggets Special page NOW!

There's a stupidly simple Nuggets competition going on at the mo. Click here and you could win some fab gear for your PC