haha, the guys at work both did pretty much the same thing with their dell's.
they couldnt get theirs to pick their voices up more than 3" away though.
was quite funny watching them -- one with his laptop up by his face, and the other with his head sideways on the desk.

"After rubbing around awhile I found where it got loudest" .. Sounds like an outofcontext to me.

Kinda weird having a mic on the laptop. You'd need to be leaning forwards all the time, or have it pick up every bit of background noise. Neat idea though, especially for voice recognition. That will be snazzy.

I don't usually comment on Brad's LiveJournal, but I was wondering what people thought: Since so many people clamor for his time and attention, and he and the others need $$ to keep LiveJournal working:
Another perk of the paid account should be that you get personalized responses to your E-mails and comments from Brad.

I'm about half joking.

-Emily

i hope that that part about half joking is a joke :)

--scott

I don't think thad would scale. Users increase, I don't. :-)

the way you've been eatin' lately, i'd rethink that last sentence

I have a built-in mic on my Toshiba Tecra. It's on the front corner. It has a better range than you would think. I used to use it to talk on Dialpad, and I was a normal distance away from the mic. The problem isn't so much the distance as it is the fact that the fan creates a lot of background noise.

There's one on my Latitude CPiR (Oct. '99). I find it fairly useless though and usually hook up an external mic when I really want to talk. It's right down in the bottom-left corner of the keyboard next to the right-arrow key. Which makes it impossible to type anything while using it or you'll totally drown out anything you say. I wonder how many people only use the mic when they're not typing.