trying to get dictation/speech/voice recognition to listen-office

[daniel l]

it is often infuriatingly hard to get the program to listen to me or to
understand that i want it to type what i'm dictating. whether it understands
that i'm talking to it seems to be random and irrelevant to the command i
give. when i click the microphone key or press flag-v or alt-t, h (for
speech) i sometimes get "dictation," sometimes "dictation paused", sometimes
"listening" , sometimes "begin dictation". in the language bar.

then i dictate (the microphone is on and i've gone through training).
"microphone" is selected in the recording control, and "micrphone" is not
muted.

sometimes it listens. sometimes it doesn't even know i'm there. it's
random, as far as i can see.

is there a trick to getting this feature to work?

 

[Bob I]

Most likely problem is high background noise combined with a soft voiced
user.

 

[daniel l]

thank you, Bob, but that's not it. i'm in a quiet office and i'm a
professional announcer. yelling at the microphone (when i'm exasperated that
it won't work) doesn't help.

what does often get it going is switching to another document and then
switching back. or ignoring the dictation bar and either typing alt-t, h
(for toggling back and forth to the speach tool itself) or using an on-off
switch on the microphone.

but it would be far preferable to use the dictation bar controls. and it
would be helpful (definitely to me and maybe to others ad to Microsoft) to
know why it seems so erratic.

anyone have other ideas?