One common area for customer questions is languages. For example, this one came in to our listen@microsoft.com alias yesterday:
Q: I live in Spain and have W. Vista in Spanish, and my voice recognition is in Spanish. How or where can I download and install it to recognize English speaking words?
A: It is great to hear from customers in non-English speaking countries. In Windows Vista, Windows Speech Recognition works in the current language of the OS. That means that in order to use another language for speech recognition, you have to have the appropriate language pack installed. Language packs are available as free downloads through Windows Update for the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Vista. Once you have the language installed, you’ll need to change the display language of the OS to the language you want to use. Both of these are options on the “Regional and Language Options” control panel. You can look in help for “Install a display language” or “Change the display language”.
If the Spanish recognizer is missing a few English words that you would like to dictate while speaking Spanish, you can add them using the speech dictionary just like any other words you want to add. On the speech context menu (right click on the Speech UI) there is an option for “Open the Speech Dictionary”. From here you can add words, and can optionally train pronunciations for them. For out of language words it is probably a good idea to train a pronunciation for them.
