ViaVoice 98 Executive offers a new speech engine, which has doubled the sampling rate of the previous version. The base active vocabulary is now 64,000 words and can be built on by customization and by using the ViaVoice Topics, which add terms for particular topics (such as financial and computer terms). The new modeless operation and natural-language commands let users create, edit, and format documents with more ease.

ViaVoice 98 Executive is available for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. For a Windows 95 or 98 system, ViaVoice 98 Executive requires a Pentium MMX/166 and 32MB of RAM, but to dictate directly into Microsoft Word 97, you will need an additional 16MB of RAM.

ViaVoice 98 Executive comes bundled with the Andrea NC80 microphone. The NC80 seems to be sufficient for its purpose, but we found it awkward to adjust for proper positioning. The arm that extends from the headset to your mouth is pretty rubbery. IBM recommends that you place the microphone end about a quarter of an inch away from the corner of your mouth, but it was difficult to position, and once in position it had a tendency to move.

After installing ViaVoice 98 Executive, you are greeted with a short movie, which gives an overview of the product and a brief tutorial. On launching the software for the first time, you must set up the microphone and the audio levels. Then the 3-minute ViaVoice User Wizard establishes you as a user by prompting you to say a few words and sentences to help ViaVoice build a personal profile. At this point your computer is ready to start listening.

To improve performance, you should use the accompanying 10- to 30-minute training session. We went through the most basic enrollment procedure, which required us to read 50 sentences as they appeared on the screen. This was simple enough, but unfortunately, the system then took 23 minutes to process the information.

ViaVoice 98 Executive places a toolbar called the IBM VoiceCenter across the top of your screen; it's much like the Windows taskbar. Though you can easily hide this, we found it useful when first using the product. The Command Status areas tell what you are currently doing.