One excellent bundled utility is the "ViaVoice Outloud" feature. Simply select a piece of text, whether writing on a webpage or a table in Word, and instruct ViaVoice to "read it to me". And it does! Simple as that. You can change the style of voice too - from childlike mumbling to granny-like chattering.
As with other versions of ViaVoice, you can also load your own frequently used words into its vocabulary database with relative ease. To do this, simply select a file - in my case one of the weekly articles I write for a UK computing magazine - and click a button. Within minutes, the contained words and paragraph styles are analysed and stored for future dictation processing.
On the negative side of ViaVoice, be wary of running on machines with limited memory. During testing, I alternated between 32MB of RAM and 64MB - and the speed of processing improved dramatically. Every speech recognition product I've ever used is memory-hungry - ensure you feed this urge!
I also found ViaVoice in general to be quite an unstable package. At some points during operation, it would simply crash, either randomly on in response to clicking a particular region on the VoiceCentre. I also noted that most of the time, my 'Exit' button didn't exactly exit. Hmmm, bit of an issue there.
