Good. Any computer within the last 3 years with 2 or more GB RAM will run WSR (Windows Speech Recognition) nicely.

 

Doing the training helps for two reasons. The system learns the user's voice to improve recognition accuracy. Training also teaches you how to use WSR. For example, Show Numbers allows for easy selection of any buttion or field on the screen though I realize this feature won't do your brother in-law any good. A good feature for him would be Select All and then Read that Back. For reading text back as in an E-mail see, "Choose which text Narrator reads aloud" It will help if you can easily create macro commands. For example to read text back you need to highlight the text and press, CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR. I just used the WSRToolkit to create this as a voice macro called Read it Back. It took about 15 seconds. You can make any keystrokes into a voice command this way.

The simplest way to do the training is to sit next to your brother in-law. Read in a whisper, each line of the training which he then repeats. If you have a good you have or purchase a good speech recognition noise canceling headset microphone that really does cancel background noise, this will make doing this easy without you being heard.

 

When the Speech Bar in WSR is showing, you can right click the speaker icon and select Open Speech Refernce Card to get the list of commands avaiable for your brother in-law to use.

WSR is very intuitive and you should not require any more help than you will find in this forum or MS-Speech Forum.

Marty Markoe, eMicrophones, Inc.