Thanks to many years of development, it boasts a fantastic level of voice-recognition accuracy, and it fits neatly into all of your Windows applications, including Word. Right now, the clear market leader is Dragon for PC. If those two tools aren’t enough for you, try a third-party program. And it does have the advantage of being built right into Word itself. In our experience, Dictate is not quite as accurate as Windows Speech Recognition, but the application is in its early days and may improve over time. To begin speaking words on the page, open this tab and click the Start button.

Now, you should see a new Dictation tab on the ribbon menu. Follow that link to download it, and then relaunch Microsoft Word.

While Windows Speech Recognition has been around for years, Microsoft recently introduced a free, experimental dictation plug-in for Microsoft Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, called Dictate. If that appeals to you, you can set the program to launch automatically whenever you start Windows: Just right-click on the app, choose Options, and hit Run at Startup. With Speech Recognition, you can control all kinds of computer actions, including launching programs and searching the computer, using only your voice. Once you’ve completed the initial voice-recognition setup, you’ll always be able to launch the utility from the taskbar (as previously described). Over time, the system should get better at recognizing your voice, and you can also train it by right-clicking on the Speech Recognition console, choosing Configuration, and clicking Improve Speech Recognition.

Windows has a short step-by-step wizard that will walk you through the process step by step. The first time you run this software, you’ll need to teach the utility to recognize your voice. To launch it, type “windows speech recognition” into the search box on the taskbar, then click the app when it appears. The integrated voice-recognition service will work on any Windows application, including Microsoft Word.

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