Computer News The News-Times Voice-recognition software is not at all daunting Indeed, as the days passed after my brief, happy sessions training with Via Voice, I found myself avoiding it. As near as I could tell, the problem was my self-consciousness about talking to a machine. Even with no one else around, I felt shy, unable to write. Without my hands on the keyboard, my brain stopped dead. The words that will flow easily when I get deeply into a writing project just refused to come out. I was a beginning writer all over again. Worse: I had no idea how to work.