Train your speech engine
Before you can use VoiceAttack effectively, it will be necessary to train your speech engine. I know this sounds a bit tedious, but, it really helps your computer understand *YOU* a lot better.
The good news is, once you are done training, you can save your training file so you don't have to go through all this trouble again if you change computers or reinstall Windows (SEE 'Back up your speech engine training file').
The nice folks over at Microsoft have included an extraordinary speech recognition engine with their latest versions of Windows. Out of the box, it does a pretty good job, but, with a little bit of training, this speech engine becomes very accurate.
To train your speech engine:
- Click 'Start' and then 'Control Panel'. If you cannot see the, 'Speech Recognition' item, click on the 'View' list and select either, 'large icons' or 'small icons'.
- Click on, 'Speech Recognition'.
- Click on, 'Train your computer to better understand you'.
- Follow the steps provided.
Note: Users of VoiceAttack have indicated that running through the training process two times produces the best results.
Add a phrase to your speech engine
With some games, English phrases just won't cut it if you are looking for fuller immersion. You can add extra words to your speech engine's vocabulary by following the next few steps :
- Click 'Start' and then 'Control Panel'. If you cannot see the, 'Speech Recognition' item, click on the 'View' list and select either, 'large icons' or 'small icons'.
- Click on, 'Speech Recognition'.
- Click on, 'Start Speech Recognition'. This launches the Windows Speech Recognition application.
- Right-click on the microphone icon and then select, 'Open the Speech Dictionary'.
- Click on 'Add a new word'.
- Enter the new word or phrase to recognize and then click, 'Next'.
- As the instructions indicate, if your phrase is not obvious, you will want to record a pronunciation. This will train your speech engine to recognize this new phrase much better.
- Click, 'Finish'.
- If you chose to record a pronunciation, click, 'Record' when you are ready.
- Your new phrase is ready to be recognized!
