I have sat through the tedious sequence of teaching my pc to recognise my voice,  but I was wondering how to get it to work on stuff like messenger or just for if I want to do a letter  :crazy:

I havnt yet used xp so i am not sure how good the speech recognition is. if it is anything like packages i have trialed in the past i can tell you not to rely too heavily on it for accuracy. the software works like your keyboard.. the pc says "ok he's pushed the 'q'key and the 'shift' key   i had better show'Q'.   you have 'trained your pc to recognize certain words and display them on the screen  eg: if you say"i'm hungry" and you have trained the pc to print the correct words when u speak it will display 'I'm hungry'.  the problem u may face, however, is the pc will not recognize a word with a different stress on it's pronounciation...you must always speak in the same tone and at roughly the same speed..
Good luck!!

I haven't had much luck with the Speech to text feature of Word XP  :(

I once tried via voice and spent 4 hours training it, but as I had a soundcard that was rubbish at the time it was not very successful. I had to reinstall that pc a few weeks later but had no way to save the training I did, after reinstall I found out it was not supplied on the backup CD’s