Speech Recognition

Well, I tried the built-in speech-to-text system in Windows XP. All you need is a microphone, and a few minutes to get it working. To try it out, I let it listen and dictate for me while I was on the phone. Here's what it got... A whole load of rubbish! My tip is to do as many of the voice training exercises as you can, because after just one or two, I was getting just unintelligible junk, but after the third, the accuracy of the speech recognition improved dramatically. I'd say it's over 80% correct now, maybe 90%.

Here's how it looked when I first started:

But as of this year are strong in Haiti you a pretty good unless it’s only because until we got some boxes of Crocker intelligence agents needed in order to tools allowed the jury locate his weekly commitments to vote for the last of the things I am saying yes AM and one thing you we could get what they would be a factor it came across a winch comes of which.

Improving your speech recognition success

After working with the Microsoft Windows XP built-in speech recognition software for a while, I doscovered these ways to dramatically improve success:

1. Go through several of the training activities. Results improve by about 10 or 20% for each session you complete.
2. Learn to speak clearly. There are certain ways that I talk that it just doesn't like, so I had to be careful with how I said them.
3. Teach it words it doesn't know. There is a facility available from the language bar to teach it the words that it doesn't already know about. You just record the word and type it in, and from then on the system knows that word.
4. Learn the special words that you can say, such as "comma" and "period" so that you can speak your punctuation too.
5. Make sure the microphone isn't too close or too far from your mouth. A headset microphone is best, because once you've adjusted it to the right distance, it stays in the same place.

That's it. Have fun!