Windows Speech Recognition

Windows Speech Recognition

The tutorial for Windows Speech Recognition in Windows Vista depicting the selection of text in WordPad for deletion.
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Initial release	November 30, 2006; 17 years ago (2006-11-30)
Operating system	Windows Vista and later
Type	Speech recognition

Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) is speech recognition developed by Microsoft for Windows Vista that enables voice commands to control the desktop user interface, dictate text in electronic documents and email, navigate websites, perform keyboard shortcuts, and operate the mouse cursor. It supports custom macros to perform additional or supplementary tasks.

WSR is a locally processed speech recognition platform; it does not rely on cloud computing for accuracy, dictation, or recognition, but adapts based on contexts, grammars, speech samples, training sessions, and vocabularies. It provides a personal dictionary that allows users to include or exclude words or expressions from dictation and to record pronunciations to increase recognition accuracy. Custom language models are also supported.

With Windows Vista, WSR was developed to be part of Windows, as speech recognition was previously exclusive to applications such as Windows Media Player. It is present in Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows RT, Windows 10, and Windows 11. The so-called "Startup" of Windows Vista Beta is actually the startup of the speech recognition tutorial, and Vista beta used Windows XP sounds ^[1][2]