I haven’t been very happy with Microsoft voice recognition in the past but recently I noticed that there is a microphone on the Windows 10 software keyboard function. When I click it, I can type sentences like this using my voice instead of the keyboard. It’s exceptional and hardly ever makes a mistake so I decided I should give Microsoft voice recognition a second try.
To my surprise, it still sucks. It’s horrible. Why on earth would it be different than the microphone voice keyboard? Oh well.
After experimenting with Google for a few moments trying to figure out why Microsoft would have two different voice engines and one that worked and one that didn’t, I discovered that start shift H brings up the voice dictation that’s used for the Microsoft keyboard and not the speech recognition tool. I’m quite happy because I fiddled in previous months with various WordPress speech-to-text plugins and none really worked very well. I’ve also tried various Google extensions to include voice. Since this particular method works so well, you pretty much obsolete all of those others. The only thing it does poorly is punctuation but I can live with that. I’m sure there is a way that I can use my voice slightly differently so that it recognizes things like the comma without printing come on or karma or other various humorous words instead of the actual punctuation mark.
I still don’t fully understand why they are two completely different programs and one is so horrible while the other is just as good as Google on Windows 10. I should point out that Google Voice isn’t supported on windows for some unusual reason. I am happy to have discovered this today and will continue to use it regularly to compose blogs and other text on my windows machine rather than my previous workaround which was to use the phone for blogging.
