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Introduction: Typing is a chore that we must all endure at some point, but with the speech recognition software in Microsoft Word, producing long documents can now be faster, and as easy as simply telling your computer what to write for you!

Step 1: Getting the right equipment
Firstly, attach a microphone to your computer, and ensure that it is working correctly. This can be done through the Control Panel (from the Start menu), and click on Sound, Speech and Audio devices link, and continue to the voice tab. You can then use the 'Test Hardware' button to ensure that your microphone is working correctly.

Step 2: Setting up Word Dictation on your PC
Open Microsoft Word, and click on the Tools menu tab. If you see an option within that menu called 'Speech', proceed directly to step 2.

The first step in this process is to update your Microsoft Office to include the Voice Dictation feature. To do this, you must go to your Control Panel (in the Start menu) and go to the “Add or remove programs” option. Within this, find Microsoft Office, and click the 'Change' button. Select the 'Add or Remove Features' button, and click next. 'Choose advanced customization of Applications' and Update. When you expand the Office Shared Features section, do the same with 'Alternative User Input'. Click on the button next to speech and select 'Run from My Computer'. Click on Update and any missing components will be installed.

Step 3: Training
Launch Microsoft Word, and click on the Tools menu tab. Within this menu, you should now see a Speech button. Click on this, and Microsoft will begin setting up your Word recognition configuration. It is an automated process, and it will first ask you to speak into the microphone, reading a short sentence to test the volume settings. You will see the volume of your voice within a bar with three colors. Yellow is too quiet, green is correct, and red is too loud. It will adjust this automatically, and within the test bar, you will see the volume staying within the green option for the whole sentence. Once this is working correctly, click next.

The training program will now ask you to read a series of paragraphs to configure your voice recognition training. These sentences will teach Word how to recognize your own voice, and will increase its accuracy in interpreting your speech patterns. As you speak the sentence, what you have already said (that has been recognized), will be highlighted in blue. You can pause the configuration at any time, and continue it when you are ready.

Once you have finished the mandatory training, you can begin to use Speech recognition straight away, however, it is recommended that you continue with more training by clicking on the 'more training' button. This will further enhance Word's ability to understand what you say. The more training you do, the better Word will understand your commands.

Step 4: Using Word Dictation

Once the speech recognition feature has been enabled, the Language Bar will be available at the top of your screen. When you wish to begin dictating to Microsoft Word, click the Dictation button in the toolbar, and begin talking into the microphone. Word will automatically translate the spoken word into text on the screen. While you are dictating, the words you speak will appear as a blue box. It is not necessary to wait for all of the blue to turn into words before continuing. Word will continue to translate your speech into text as you go, without you needing to pause, or wait for the computer to catch up with you.

Step 5: Advanced Tools

There are several advanced user tools, such as grammar recognition, and toolbar usage. Within the language bar, switch to the 'voice command' button, and from here you can simply speak the command you wish. To open a menu bar, simply say 'file menu' to open the file menu. This works with every tool you have access to; it is worth experimenting to find out just how easy you can navigate the various menus and commands. The most basic of which is saying 'save' to save the current document. When you have finished using the voice commands, simply click on the 'Dictation' button in the language bar to continue dictating your document.

To make things easier, you can also use the words 'voice-command' and 'dictation' to switch between these two modes of input.

These are direct voice commands instead of speech; for example, to include grammar such as a comma, you say 'comma' and for semi-colon, you say 'semi-colon'. To enter a full stop, say 'dot' or 'period'. Other grammatical characters can be included as well using this method.

Something to be careful of are words called 'homophones'. These are words which sound alike, such as there, they're and their. To help overcome the problems that these words can cause during dictation, highlight the incorrectly interpreted word, click on the 'Correction' button in the language bar, and select the right word from the menu that appears.

Another aspect of this speech-recognition software, is that it will learn your pronunciation of various words. If you wish to say the name of a company, or use a word that would not normally be used within the Microsoft dictionary, simply type the word using the keyboard, and click the 'Record Pronunciation' button before dictating the word into the microphone. In this way, very word you could ever wish to use can be added to the dictionary.

Step 6: Other Microsoft Office Documents

Although the speech recognition software is most effective within Microsoft Word, it also works in other Microsoft Office applications. As Outlook uses Word for composing emails, this speech-recognition can also be used when writing emails.

One of the chief benefits of this speech recognition software is that every single command and tool can be used using speech recognition. The best way to learn is to experiment, and write documents faster than the speed of speech!