Making life easier

Find out who’s sneaking onto your wi-fi, dictate your emails and more with these free services

is where Microsoft employees get encouragement and support to develop experimental software with practical applications. Speech recognition software has always held out the promise of hands free typing, which could be tremendously useful for anyone with a disability that makes it difficult to use a keyboard, and one Garage project is Dictate (www.dictate.ms). It’s a free speech recognition add-on for Microsoft Word, Outlook and Powerpoint that will let you dictate documents, emails and presentations rather than using the keyboard.

If you’d like to try speech recognition software and have MS Office you can experiment with Dictate at no cost. While you’re at the Garage Project check out some of the other tools and programs to see if anything could be of use, such as the personal shopping assistant.

Unless you’re a very forgiving person, you’ve probably had problems with a few large companies. For example, the software you bought might not work, or you’ve got a huge, unexpected charge on your cell phone bill. You could spend a lot of time looking for a contact phone number, or try Get Human (https:// gethuman.com).

The concept of the service is that for a fee a rep from Get Human will phone the company and wait on hold and eventually solve your problem, or contact you when they get through to customer service and then let you take over the conversation. However, you don’t have to pay anything to get tremendous value from Get Human.

At the bottom of the home page click on Phone Numbers. It’s a U.S. service but its database has many Canadian companies for which you can search by name. You’ll get the customer service phone number, the hours you can call, plus all kinds of useful information supplied by other users of Get Human, such as how to get past a tricky menu system, how long the average wait time is, plus the most common issues that people called about and how they were eventually resolved.