If you are using speech recognition with Ultra Hal Assistant to communicate with Hal using your voice, it is imperative that you use a high quality headset microphone such as this one. Desktop microphones and built-in monitor pick up too much background noise and are very poor for speech recognition.

More tips on getting the best speech recognition results:

• Run the Microphone setup to setup the microphone properly
• Make sure you use a high quality headset microphone. Desktop microphones and built in microphones work poorly.
• Make sure there is no background noise that the microphone might pickup.
• Speak clearly in a relaxed tone of voice. Don''t speak too fast or mesh your words together too much.
• Record yourself speaking using the sound recorder program included with windows to verify that your speech is clear and easy to understand. Make sure the speech is not distorted, that "P" and "B" sound ok, and that it is not too quiet.
• Run many training sessions.
• Go into the speech recognition engines advanced settings and change the slider to favor high accuracy over speed.