Ask Paul: December 8

Happy Friday! We had our first snow flurries the other day, but these reader questions are a wonderful distraction from this cold and dark season.
Speech recognition in Windows
RussDW asks:

With the Microsoft acquisition of Nuance completed over 18 months ago and MS this week deprecating the Vista-era Windows Speech Recognition Technology, one wonders: what's in store for integrating Dragon speech recognition into Windows? It's not clear that the current Voice Access capabilities in Windows 11 are even based on Nuance technology.

I assume that Voice Access is specifically based on Dragon speech recognition. I hadn't seen that the legacy Windows speech recognition technology had been disabled, but I guess that just happened, and given how good Voice Access is, it makes sense. It's unlikely that Microsoft acquired Nuance but independently created Voice Access. But I'm surprised they've not promoted this in some way.

Regardless of how Voice Access came about, I think it's fair to say that speech recognition will play a big role in the shift to more natural user experiences as discussed below. In addition to the accessibility use cases, using one's voice to interact with Copilot or other AI experiences is a lot more natural than typing prompts into a text box.
I have a notion
jrzoomer asks:

Paul I heard you say that you're still using Notion, is it a more momentum based decision, ie the product is actually good enough for your needs vs hassle of migrating to Loop or any other reason?

I write and talk about workflow a lot, and I make a point of experimenting with different devices, apps, services, and other tech products with the aim of determining whether there are better alternatives than what I am using or doing. Most often, I identify some shortcomings that make switching impossible, but that's fine: If all I've done is validate what I do or how I do it, it's worth it.

Notion is one of those rare and delightful examples of something that was demonstrably better than what I was using before (OneNote, in this case), and like other game-changers I've switched to over the past year or two---like Brave for web browsing and Clipchamp for video editing---it's something I can recommend without reservation. My use of Notion has only expanded, and dramatically, since I started using it.

And that's the real issue for what I assumed would be a transition to Loop this year for all the obvious reasons. Not so much inertia---or switching "costs," or whatever---but rather that the bar is so high. Loop can't just sort of work. It needs to work as well as Notion does. And Notion works really well.

Sadly, Loop is a mess right now. It's been a slow boil from a development perspective. Microsoft announced Loop two years ago, but its underlying technology, called Fluid Framework, was first announced in early 2019. And like so much else Microsoft has released this year, including Copilot for Windows 11 and the new Outlook, it's coming ...