If you have Windows Vista, though, you might be surprised to find that voice recognition is built in – and that it’s pretty good. While it takes some getting used to, with a little practice you’ll soon be able to use speech recognition to create and edit documents as well as to control most of the functions of your computer. Before you can begin using speech recognition, you’ll need to spend about an hour setting it up. This involves detecting your headset or microphone, running through a tutorial, and training the software to recognize your speech patterns. To get started, complete these steps: It’s probably best if you find a quiet, secluded area to run through the set-up. First of all, you want your voice and only your voice to register when you’re training the software. More importantly, people will give you all sorts of crazy looks when they see you talking gibberish to your computer. Once you’re set up, you can begin to enjoy the wonders of modern speech recognition. When you ran the tutorial, you learned how to do most basic tasks, so I won’t revisit those, but here are a few general tips:
Use speech recognition in a quiet place. If your microphone is any good at all, it will pick up all the stray noises in your vicinity and attempt to transcribe them. For some reason, my PC interprets every random sound as the word “if”. Turn speech recognition off when you’re thinking. You say “stop listening” to put speech recognition into “sleep” mode; it awakes when you say “start listening”. For some reason, having it waiting and ready to transcribe when I’m thinking makes me feel rushed and nervous and I end up not being able to concentrate; turning off speech recognition is a way of acknowledging to myself that I can think things through as long as I need to. Plus, leaving it on is just inviting a string of random gibberish as the program transcribes the noise you make moving around, working, and even breathing. Speak strongly and clearly. It helps to pretend you’re giving a speech. Use your best “Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address” voice. “Spell it”. When you introduce a new word to the software’s vocabulary, or when you use a word that sounds like a lot of other words, the program is liable to screw up. Just say “spell it’ and spell the word out, slowly and precisely. Retrain from time to time. As you get better at this (and it does take a while) you’ll change the way you talk — you’ll learn to speak more clearly, and you’ll become more confident thinking “on the fly”. Every once in a while, run through the tutorial and voice training, and have it scan your documents to pick up any new words. This has the added benefit of reminding you of things you’ve forgotten you could do. Be patient. Don’t get too discouraged when you get a lot of errors on your first (and second, and third) try. You will get better at this with practice.
There are good reasons to use speech recognition beside physical impairment that makes typing difficult or impossible. Using it well requires a level of vocal control and clarity that we don’t often practice, which helps to improve your speaking ability. It also helps learn to think on your feet — you’ll be surprised at how hard it is at first to compose meaningful sentences while speaking! It’s also a good way to move from a written draft to a typed draft; speaking your sentences aloud helps to catch awkward, unnatural phrasings that the eye tends to skip over. It’s also a good way to transcribe voice notes if you’re the kind of person that uses a digital recorder to take reminders over the course of the day.
