Editing documents by voice... Is it possible? How?

I'm experimenting with dictation in Windows 11 because I want to be able to write emails and such without using my hands. The dictation process itself works pretty well, but I can't find any instructions for editing what I've dictated.

I'm trying to do it by intuition, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't.

• “Select” sometimes works and sometimes does nothing,. So far i haven't figured out why.
• Some commands produce bizarre results. For example, “scratch that” sometimes deletes the sentence preceding the one the insert point is in, even though that's not the last thing I wrote.
• For another example, when I dictated “Windows 11” above it was written in lower case. Then I said “select windows 11,” and it correctly selected that phrase; then I said “capitalize that,” and it capitalized the whole sentence instead of the selected phrase.
• How to move the insert point? How to correct a misidentified word? How to spell out a difficult word or an arbitrary series of characters, or tell it to simulate a key press such as F4 or Shift+F3? All mysteries.

I need a reference that tells me what commands it will recognize and what they do. So far all I have found is “instructions” for using the feature, which basically tell me to click the “Dictate” button and talk, as if that's all it does

Please, please, tell me there is some documentation.

Hi @jhsachs

What software are you using?

@jhsachs

Won't solve your problem... but here's ten points for filling out your computer specs.

are you using the "Voice Access" in windows 11?

Marcus and dacrone. I'm using the "Dictate" icon in Outlook's Message ribbon or Word's Home ribbon. The examples in my original post were taken from work in Outlook, but I think the behavior in Word must be the same.

As I said, I can't find any real documentation; therefore I don't know the name Microsoft uses for this feature. Maybe it's Voice Access, or maybe it's something else. I think of it as "Windows speech recognition."

Later: I looked up Voice Access and read enough to be reasonably confident that it's not what I'm using. The instructions I found said: "When you turn on voice access for the first time, you are prompted to download voice access language files to be used by on-device speech recognition." When I started using this feature, it did no such thing. It just worked.

Maybe if I use Voice Access I'll have better luck. The instructions I found included a link to a list of Voice Access commands.
,

@jhsachs

These two pages from MS may be of use.

I think what you are looking for is this:
Edit Text With Voice - Microsoft Support

and this for actual commands:
Voice Access Commands List - Microsoft Support


This is part of Windows 11 and not tied to a specific application.
Hope this helps.

It appears that I have been using Voice Access. It never asked me to load a dictionary as the instructions say it should, but the instructions are pretty clear that the microphone button in Word and Outlook opens Voice Access, and they don't mention any other speech recognition facility in Windows.

I've come to a tentative conclusion that it's unusable. I'm reluctant to accept this, because the alternative (Dragon Naturally Speaking) has become so expensive, but:

Many of the commands, like "caps" and "correct that," simply don't work. Voice Access interprets them as ordinary speech every time.

Other commands word inconsistently. "Select <a word or phrase>" may find one word in the document on the first try, but consistently fail to find another. Some commands are executed some of the time, and are interpreted as ordinary text at other times.

It can't correct its errors cleanly. For example, if I speak a command, see that it was interpreted as text, and say "scratch that," it deletes the text, but often deletes the last letter of the preceding word as well, or inserts a space after the first letter of the following word.

It uses punctuation and spaces according to its own rules instead of the rules accepted in English. For example, I wanted to type "(1)." When I said "left parenthesis one right parentheses" it type '( 1 )' (with spaces). When I said "left parenthesis no space one no space right parenthesis," it typed '(no space one no space)'.

It tends to interpret every incidental noise as a word. For example, my cat jumped off my desk and it typed something. I turned my head, and it typed something. Sometimes it types a something when there has been no sound at all.

Thank you for your assistance with this. Voice Access appears to be a well-intentioned but badly executed effort that isn't worth messing with.

I often use the feature called 'Voice Typing' to dictate text into documents or fields like this one on this site. It is activated by pressing the Windows Key plus H. It is different from 'Voice Access' because it does not allow you to control aspects of your computer but is only for dictation. There is some documentation to be found at


Not sure what the OPS needs are, but 'Voice Typing' works well for me.