About a month ago, the excellent voice recognition in my Tablet PC stopped working. I eventually concluded it was related to a Windows Update because shortly afterwards my wife’s tablet behaved identically, and her updates typically lag mine a little. I wasted a lot of time Googling, reapplying updates, uninstalling and reinstalling Speech components…all to no avail. The consistent faults point to sprseng.dll, about which there is very little information availabile.
This is incredibly frustrating.
Something I had come to rely on just working, suddenly going away without any clear cause or the ability to rollback to a working copy. I do have my Norton Ghost images of the drive, but I’m not even sure where to start and I don’t think random mix-and-match on the SAPI dll’s is a good use of my time.
I finally broke down and bought Jill a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking since she really needed recognition to work *now*, whereas my RSI is under control enough that I mostly type nowadays.
All I can say from a calm state of mind is that it just doesn’t pay to get hooked on anything from Microsoft before its 3rd or 4th major version. It’s not that they make bad software — quite the contrary — it’s just that when something goes wrong you are really without any good options.
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