Improve Recognition

Speech recognition is not always accurate, but there are several things you can do to improve it.

Microphone

The quality of your microphone is important to speech recognition. See Microphone.

Microphone Input Level

If the operating system microphone input level is set too low or too high, this may affect recognition quality. See Microphone.

Microphone Setup

The Utterly Voice microphone setup settings can affect recognition quality. Be sure to experiment with different values to find what works best for you. See Setup.

Context

Speech recognizers rely on context. For example, "to" and "two" are homophones (like-sounding words). Most recognizers will correctly recognize "I own two bicycles". A recognizer chooses "two" over "to", because that makes more sense in the phrase.

The more context you can provide in each utterance, the better. This means that longer utterances with normal language flow will be recognized better than shorter utterances. If you try to provide "I own two bicycles" as four separate utterances, a recognizer may or may not get it correct.

Commands are usually short, which makes recognition more difficult. It helps to name your commands so that they fit within normal language flow as much as possible. A command like "open new tab" is recognized better than a command like "tab new".

Enunciation and Speech Rate

It is important to pronounce words clearly, and you should not speak too quickly. This is especially important with short utterances, like commands. The shorter the utterance, the more clearly and slowly you should speak. With longer utterances, the recognizer is provided with more context, so it can handle some poor pronunciation and fast speaking.

Mode and Command Alternates

In your mode and command settings, there is an optional field called "alternates". This field takes a list of phrases that are accepted as matches for the mode or command. For example, the "mouse go up" command has "moscow up" as an alternate. If you say "mouse go up", but the recognizer incorrectly hears "moscow up", the interpreter will execute the "mouse go up" command.

For information on how to set alternates, see Settings Files.

Bias

In both your mode and your command settings, you can set bias values that can increase or decrease the likelihood of certain phrases from being recognized. This is very helpful when you want to boost the recognition of commands or phrases you say often, or you want certain phrases to be ignored because they are frequently a result of inaccurate recognition.

For more information, see Bias.