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One of the great things about the Chinese language is that the written form is the same; dialect has almost nothing to do with how the language is written down.

This is not true, of course, but it is what we are all taught.

The truth is that the grammar of written Chinese today is broadly based on the language spoken in Beijing.

 Our local friends who are speakers of Cantonese read the characters with a completely different pronunciation from anyone else.

This means that any system for inputting Chinese characters that is based on pronunciation will work only for the group upon whose dialect the system was created.

On my Macintosh I have both Mandarin and Cantonese input methods and they are based on the pinyin romanisation for Mandarin (Putonghua) and the D C Lau romanisation for Cantonese. Characters are entered by typing in the romanised version with or without the tone.

There are, however, other methods, most of which are based on the shape of the character. One of the most popular is the cangjie system.

The popularity of this method is that it is independent of dialect, an important consideration for those who do not speak the language of the North.

Apple has decided that despite this confusion, there is a vocal solution to input. The Chinese Language Dictation Kit is aimed at speakers of Putonghua.

At first this sounds like another gimmick that is being flogged for little reason. In fact, the CDK is a serious and surprisingly accurate package.

The kit comes complete with an earpiece and attached microphone. It can be installed on top of an English-language system that has the Chinese Language Kit installed.

The system prompts the speaker to say a few hundred words and after that it creates a file that is unique to the speaker.

This file can be copied to a floppy disk and moved to any other system that has the CDK installed and the person whose voice patterns it represents can then use the machine.

Apple claims that a beginner can easily reach a speed of 40 characters per minute and that an experienced person can go even higher.

What I have seen is certainly quite impressive.

Not only can you speak at near normal speed, but if you are using ordinary phrases, they will pop up on the screen with ease, needing only minimum tweaking if a character is wrong.

The system is perfect for the unselfconscious who are fairly good at Putonghua and can recognise the right character when they see it.

It is rather less than perfect for speakers of Cantonese only.

Apple has said there are, as yet, no plans to create a Cantonese version.

One of the great advantages Chinese has in the area of speech recognition is the ability to distinguish words.

It is considerably easier to put a faint pause between two words - most words are two or four syllables - in Chinese than it is in English or French.

Even with the addition of the tone, this makes it far easier for a machine to distinguish words.

When Bill Gates was in Hong Kong last December, he said the best speech recognition software in the world was Chinese.

He did not say that it was also from Apple.



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