4 stars (Might change my fiance's life!!!!!) - My girlfriend has Multiple Sclerosis and has become limited in her ability to type. She was using an on-screen keyboard with a mouse, when I met her. One day I watched her type a short note to her mother she spent hours on two paragraphs. I told her that there had to be a better way and after a short search found ViaVoice. It was affordable and we decided to give it a try. We installed it the day it came and right away she was able to use its built in word processor to write letters to friends and family. We've only been working with it for 2 weeks, now, but it is a vast improvement over the onscreen keyboard. She can dictate a letter and make corrections in a fraction of the time possible before. I hate that it seems tied to Microsoft but it seems to be adaptable to other software systems. We are learning togather, it's fun. 3 stars (Continuous speech recognition needs a VERY fast CPU and RAM) - Those that say this software is "unstable" do not take into consideration the VERY high cpu usage needed to perform continuous speech recognition (as ooposed to "discrete" speech dictation used in IBM VoiceType, which was possible on a Pentium 1 233 Mhz, and required users to pause between words). In short: get a gigabyte of ram, specially if you're using WinXP. If you run Win2000 with 512MB ram, try to add an extra 256mb stick. And your cpu should be at the very least a 2Ghz Pentium 4, or higher, despite what the box claims. With these requirements in mind, the software works as advertised in my experience. 2 stars (Good recognition, but very unstable program) - This is my first experience with dictation software, so I don't have anything to compare it to. All I can do is offer observations on how this one has worked for me. Training this software takes quite a long time; a few hours if you want to get maximum performance. I actually wouldn't mind so much, except that you need to retrain it every time you buy a... Nuance Communications Inc :: ibm :: viavoice :: advanced :: 10 :: 0 :: nuance :: communications :: inc :: internet :: communications :: ibmviavoiceadvanced10 0 :: IBM VIAVOICE Advanced 10 0