The fun part of the SideWinder GameVoice is that the software will run steadily under a game. I've tried the SideWinder GameVoice with Need for Speed Porsche challenge, Quake III and Counter Strike. For the last one I needed a DirectX Sound driver update, but once installed we where able to chat with each other mid-game. I tell you guys this is the best scenario one can get. Counter-strike is a very addictive game, image you and your friends set up a terrorist and a counter-terrorist team. You'll be able to chat mid-game with your friends and discuss strategy to eliminate the other team. A very cool feature folks. Unfortunately with a game like Counter Strike generates a lot of data-traffic. Sometimes the voice chat will become slow or starts to 'stutter' I'm betting though that when DirectX 8 final will be released a lot of these issues will be solved.

 Mid-game Speech recognition
The second feature of the GameVoice is speech recognition. Don't get me wrong, you will not be able to voice dictate letters. No, the GameVoice has been created for gamers and therefore the primary function is to enable macro's and key combinations with your voice.

For example, If you'd like to select a weapon in Quake III you'll just have to say the name of that weapon and it will be activated. So, if your say ' Grenade Launcher' the Grenade Launcher will be activated if your voice is recognized.
Unfortunately this is not all glory. Roughly two out of three spoken commands work properly, in our case there was always a one out of three chance that a command was not recognized. This is partly to blame the way Microsoft handles Speech Recognition. In the past we've had to learn our PC our voice. Microsoft has reversed that problem by learning us to adapt to the PC's voice, Confused ? The GameVoice uses phonetic speech. If you type in a word like 'Guru3D.com' the PC will let you hear that word the way the PC interprets it. Now you and I have to adapt our voice to a voice style that sounds like the PC. On most cases this works out reasonable well, however non English speaking persons could have a problem with this. The best way is to assign a weapon to easy words like 'one', 'two' and 'Three'. 

If you are midgame talking to a friend and you want to voice activate a command then you can press a special 'command' button on the command module which will activate speech recognition until your speech-command has been activated. There are many game-profiles that are included in the software. But you can also make your custom profiles for any game you like to configure with speech recognition.