Training the System

Once you're finished going through the wizard, it's a good idea to train your system to better recognize your voice. It's an easy process that doesn't take much time. To begin speech training, click on the Speech Tools down arrow and choose Voice Training. You'll see a dialog box that looks like in the one in Figure 9.5, where you choose which text to read for your voice-training session.

Figure 9.5. Choose the text you want to read for your voice-training session.

You will then see a dialog box like the one in Figure 9.6. This is where you read the text aloud, and the system learns how you speak.

Figure 9.6. Begin reading the text aloud so that the system will understand how you speak.

When you're finished reading the text for the voice-training session, you will see the Updating Speech Profile dialog box, as shown in Figure 9.7. Your Tablet PC now knows how you speak and will be able to recognize your voice more accurately.

Figure 9.7. When you're finished reading the text, the Voice Training Wizard updates your speech profile.

Tip

Spend a little extra time to go through one of the additional voice training sessions. This will increase the accuracy of speech recognition.

When you're finished with the training session, you will be asked if you want to provide more training. The more you train your system, the better it will be able to recognize your voice, yielding higher accuracy in speech-to-text conversion.

Now that you've finished the training, it's time to start using your speech-recognition capabilities. But first, let's use the Speech tutorial to get a better handle on the basics of speech recognition.

Use the Speech Tutorial to Get the Basics

As soon as you finish training the speech-recognition tool, you'll be asked if you want to run the Speech tutorial. I suggest that you run the tutorial, because it will help you get the basics down. When you run the Speech tutorial, you will see a screen that looks like the one shown in Figure 9.8.

Figure 9.8. Use the Speech tutorial to get acquainted with speech recognition quickly.

From this screen, tap on the Using Speech link to start the video tutorial. You'll see a screen like the one shown in Figure 9.9.

Figure 9.9. The Using Speech tutorial uses video to show you how to effectively use speech recognition.