5 ways to control Windows with your voice

Physical keyboards are great, but microphone input has long been a staple for many PC power users. Sometimes, you can just speak faster than you can type. And it’s not just about typing with your voice — it’s about controlling your operating system, too.

Modern smartphones brought voice input to the masses. Many years ago, Dragon NaturallySpeaking was a major speech recognition tool beloved by many professionals for productivity. Dragon’s software is still around, but it’s now owned by Microsoft, which offers powerful voice-recognition tools in Windows.

Those tools are getting better all the time, and they’re surprisingly capable. If you’re interested in controlling your PC with your voice, you should whether these options meet your needs before spending $699 on Dragon Professional.

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The many Windows voice-recognition features explained

Windows has an assortment of built-in speech recognition options.

With Windows 11, you can choose from two separate features: Voice Typing and Voice Access. Voice Typing is just for dictating text into documents and other text boxes. Voice Access lets you control your PC — and it lets you dictate text, too. Voice Access is a newer feature, and it works offline; Voice Typing requires an internet connection.

Windows 10 has Windows Dictation. This is an older version of Voice Typing. Like the version in Windows 11, Windows Dictation requires an internet connection to function.

Both versions of Windows also have a much older feature named Windows Speech Recognition — for now. Windows Speech Recognition will be removed from Windows 11 starting in September, though it will continue to work on Windows 10.

Additionally, if you use Microsoft Word via a Microsoft 365 subscription, you’ll have a Dictate feature built into Word. This uses technology similar to Voice Typing and Windows Dictation and requires an internet connection.

Type with your voice in Windows

To get started with Voice Typing (on Windows 11) or Windows Dictation (Windows 10), just press Windows+H on your keyboard at any time. You’ll see a floating dictation box (on Windows 11) or bar (on Windows 10).

To dictate text, click the microphone button or press Windows+H again. Then, speak into your microphone. Windows will convert your speech into words and insert them in the current text box.

Windows 11’s voice typing tool is a small floating window, while Windows 10 gets a bar at the top of the screen.Chris Hoffman, IDG

By default, Windows makes you speak your punctuation marks. You will need to say things like “comma” and “period” out loud while dictating text. This may be helpful for accurately typing professional documents.

You can, however, have Windows 11 insert punctuation automatically, if you like. Just click the gear icon in the voice typing window and activate “Automatic punctuation.” (This option doesn’t appear to be present on Windows 10, but you can use the Dictate feature within Word — more on that in a moment — to get automatic punctuation while typing documents on the older OS.)

You can also say commands like “Delete that” or “Scratch that” to delete the last word or phrase you spoke. Then when you’re done, you can say “Stop listening,” click the microphone button, or press Windows+H again.

One last thing: If you have a touch-screen device, you can also start using voice typing by tapping the microphone on the touch keyboard.

For a full list of voice commands in each supported language, consult this Microsoft support page.

Control your PC with your voice

On a Windows 11 PC, you can use Voice Access to control your PC. If you say something out loud that doesn’t sound like a voice command, Voice Access will simply insert it into the current text box. As a bonus, this feature also works offline, unlike Voice Typing and Windows Dictation.

To access it, open your Start menu and search for “Voice access.” Launch the “Voice access” shortcut. You’ll see a voice access bar at the top of your screen. You can say “Voice access wake up” or click the microphone icon on the bar to activate it.

The voice access bar sits at the top of your screen while the application is running, waiting for you to speak.Chris Hoffman, IDG

Want a full list of everything you can accomplish with this system? Just say, “What can I say?” out loud, and you’ll get a menu of all the voice access commands available.

The options are surprisingly diverse. For example, you can say “Click [something]” to click a clickable button with that name on your screen — like “Click OK.” You can say “Show numbers” to see a list of numbers superimposed over clickable items on your screen, and you can then say any of those numbers to click it. There are also voice commands for selecting, editing, and formatting text.

Voice Access even lets you create your own custom voice commands to perform specific actions when you say certain phrases. From the “What can I say?” window, select “Voice shortcuts” in the sidebar to get started.

You can use the gear menu at the top-right corner of your screen, meanwhile, to activate options like automatic punctuation and make voice access automatically launch every time you sign into your PC.

Voice Access is just for Windows 11 PCs, but you can issue similar voice commands with the older Windows Speech Recognition feature on Windows 10.

Dictate and transcript text in Word

Windows-level features aside, you can also use the dictation feature built directly into Word — if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. Within the Word Windows app, either click the “Dictate” button on the Home tab on the ribbon or press Alt+` (that’s a grave accent character — it’s the key you’ll find above the Tab key).

You can then simply speak into your microphone to type into a document. Press Alt+` to quickly toggle it on and off. As with voice typing and dictation, you’ll need to speak punctuation marks by default. But you can also click the gear icon and activate “Enable auto-punctuation.”

The Dictate button in Word provides a quick way to type with your voice.Chris Hoffman, IDG

As a bonus, Microsoft Word also offers a built-in transcription feature in Microsoft 365. You can click the down arrow below Dictate on the ribbon bar and select “Transcribe” to pull up the transcription sidebar.

With this sidebar, you can upload your own audio files or start recording. Microsoft will transcribe the audio and convert it to text.

Use built-in dictation tools in other applications, too

Of course, you don’t have to use the tools built into Windows. Lots of applications have built-in powerful dictation systems of their own. If you use Google Docs, for example, you can press Ctrl+Shift+S or click Tools > Voice Typing to start dictating text into a document.

You can also use voice search in search engines like Google. On the main Google website, click the microphone icon or press Ctrl+Shift+. (that’s the Ctrl key, the Shift key, and a period) to activate voice search.

Get a voice assistant for Windows PCs

Windows is the only major computing platform today that doesn’t include a voice assistant. Microsoft removed Cortana from the OS, so Windows doesn’t have this built in anymore.

However, there’s still one voice assistant you can use: Amazon offers an official Alexa app for Windows PCs. You can download Alexa from the Microsoft Store and then use Alexa voice commands on your PC.

If you have Alexa automations set up for your business or home office, this might be the ideal solution. (Google doesn’t offer an official Google Assistant app for Windows PCs.)

Consider upgrading your microphone

The classic (and not-long-for-this-world) Windows Speech Recognition feature offered ways to better train Windows to understand your individual voice and way of speaking. These newer tools don’t have anything like that, unfortunately — if they don’t seem to be understanding you, there’s no way to train them to do so.

So if you’re having trouble getting your PC to reliably understand your speech, you should consider getting a better microphone. Sound quality often isn’t optimal with the built-in microphone on an average laptop, and that can be enough to cause voice recognition errors. A good headset or a solid desktop microphone like a Blue Yeti will likely do much better.

Just be sure to select the right microphone in the voice typing feature you’re using — in each of them, you’ll see a settings menu where you can select your microphone input device.

Naturally, your environment also matters — background noise will make it harder for this sort of software to understand you. It’s worth tweaking your microphone settings and perhaps trying to speak more slowly and enunciate more clearly if the software has trouble parsing your words.

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