Setting Up Voice Recognition in Windows 7

By Richard Hay, on December 5th, 2009

“Computer – Tea, Earl Gray, Hot.”

At least that is how Captain Jean Luc Picard did it in Star Trek; The Next Generation.

Did you know that Windows 7 comes with voice recognition built right into the operating system? If you have a microphone and want to give it a try here is how you do it:

Hit your Windows Key or click on the Windows Start Menu Orb and type in voice recognition. Hit return to start the voice recognition setup.

This screen is the starting point and explains what voice recognition can do for you. Hit Next to get started.

This is the screen where you set up the volume for the microphone your going to use. I actually used the built in microphone on my Logitech Communicate STX webcam. Hit Next to continue.

Your option here to allow the speech recognition software to review your documents and emails to learn how you talk/write. It is not critical to making things work. The software will learn your style over time as well. I opted to disable the review. Make your choice and hit Next to continue.

Make a choice here to either manually (by clicking the software’s mike button to start listening or use voice activated mode to have it begin when you say “Start Listening”. It is voice recognition software so why not go all out and use voice activated? Make your selection and click Next to move on.

Here is an option to print out a cheat sheet with all the commands you can speak to do things in Windows. Might be handy as your learning the commands. Or you can be like me and just push forward and learn as you go. I recommend printing out the sheet as the jumping forward did not work so well

Choose to run the speech recognition software at system start up or uncheck the block to start it up manually when you want to use it.

There you go – all done with the setup and you can now control your computer by voice. I highly recommend you do the tutorial as it helps you learn some of the commands you can give and it is a chance for the software to learn your voice and style of talking.

Here is the start page for the tutorial. You can click Next to start at the beginning or click on any of the boxes near the bottom of the screen to go into specific areas.

Enjoy. Let me know how your experience with voice recognition goes in the comments.

"Hey Computer – where is my tea?”

Richard Hay (3332 Posts)

Richard is the Owner of WindowsObserver.com and has been involved in tech for over 25 years. His first website – AnotherWin95.com – came online in 1995. Back then he used GeoCities Web Hosting for it and what you see here today is the result of the work he has continued on the site since 1995. In January 2010 his community contributions were recognized by Microsoft when he was awarded the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Windows Desktop Experience. In January 2011 he was renewed as a Microsoft MVP but in a new category called Windows Expert - Consumer and in January 2012 he received the award for the third time.

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Steve

August 22, 2010 at 9:56 am

If you come out of the speech recognition tutorial how can you get back into it?

Richard Hay

August 22, 2010 at 11:24 am

Go to Control Panel – Ease of Access – Speech Recognition and it is an option on that dialog box. Or type Speech Recognition into the Start Menu search box and select the Control Panel applet with the same name.