Microsoft Windows has a built in feature that will allow you to speak into your microphone and have your voice transcribed into text and then placed within whichever document or app you happen to be working on. This feature is available on Windows 10 as well as Windows 11. This way, if you are not the best or fastest typist, you can easily speak your words into your microphone and have them “typed” out for you. This also comes in handy for those with certain disabilities that make it harder to use the keyboard. In this article, we will be showing you how to setup your computer for speech to text dictation, also known as voice typing.
To use the speech to text dictation feature, you will need to configure a few settings before you can use it. The first thing you will need to do is go into the Windows settings app and find the Time & language section. Then under the Microphone section, click on the Get started button.
Windows will then start its troubleshooter app, and you will need to select the Cortana can’t hear me option.
You should then see any available audio devices installed on your computer. You should choose the microphone that you plan to use for the speech to text dictation feature and click on the Next button.
On the Set up your microphone screen, you will want to choose the Set up this mic option.
Next, Windows will have you calibrate your microphone by speaking some sentences into your mic so your voice can be configured properly.
Once this has been completed, you should see a message telling you that the troubleshooting has been completed and you can then click on the Close button.
The next step involves clicking on the Speech privacy settings link under Related settings in the same Time & language settings page.
Here you will need to make sure that the Online speech recognition option is turned on.
Once you set up your microphone in the Time & Language settings and enable the Speech privacy settings then you simply need to press the Windows key + H to activate voice typing and then press it again to turn it off. When you enable voice typing, you will see an icon that says listening which tells you that it is recording your voice.
If you click on the gear icon, you will have some additional options such as having the Voice typing launcher be displayed on the screen which allows you to start recoding by clicking on it rather than using the Windows key + H keyboard combination. You can also enable automatic punctuation to see how that works.
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