Voice Activation

After seeing some of the movies out lately, is there really such thing as voice activation on personal computers? I'm not talking about speaking into a microphone and it typing what you say. I'm talking about saying 'exec aim' and your computer opening up AOL Instant Messenger, or something of the sort. Anyone ever heard of this?

Yup. For instance I used a lite version of a program called GameCommander. In CS I could say "Reload" into my microphone and in game I would reload my weapon. Its just a matter of the voice recognition software allowing you to define what action is performed when a certain phrase is recognised. There are undoubtably programs out that that will let you define what exe to run when you say "run aim".

http://www.gamecommander.com/
http://www.talkingdesktop.com/

The most common example of this is found in Plus! for XP, it is the voice control for Media Player, though it seems stupid to me to have to scream to turn it off.

There are a few other applications out there that are somewhat customizable and let you define the parameters, such as saying "Techspot" might let you open this site. I can't remember the names of any of them but I'm sure a quick search of Cnet or somewhere similar would turn something up.