When you migrate user data to a new Windows Vista computer after you stop the InputPersonalization.exe process, the InputPersonalization.exe process may not start correctly. Additionally, you may lose personalization data and functionality.

Additionally, you may receive the following error message:

An error occurred in the Handwriting recognition personalization tool

Additionally, the following messages may be logged in the Application log:

Handwriting recognition personalization failed to initialize the store of handwriting samples that are used to personalize handwriting recognition.
Handwriting recognition personalization: Some or all of the handwriting samples that were collected to personalize the handwriting recognizer are unreadable

After you enter 50 sentences from the first phrase set in the Windows Vista handwriting recognition personalization tool, recognizer training is not triggered. A few seconds after you click Update and exit, you receive the following message:

Recognizer updated

When this message is displayed after only a few seconds, it indicates that recognizer training did not occur. Typically, 50 sentences should trigger recognizer training.

Note: Recognizer training usually takes several minutes to complete.

After you change the theme on a Windows Vista Tablet PC, the “Handwriting recognition personalization” tool is resized. When the tool is resized, the layout of the “Handwriting recognition personalization tool” becomes distorted.

There are plenty of clips showing Vista’s speech recognition feature failing, and one of the most popular is “MSFT Financial Analyst Meeting 2006: Steve Ballmer”. It appears that most of the clips from this event were edited prior to distribution and while they include the speech recognition acting crazy, they don’t include what happened right after that, which showed it working perfectly. Here’s a clip that shows both the bad and the good.

A little utility that turns off Vista’s Speed Recognition (SR) after a few minutes with no activity Keep reading →

A review of this often bemoaned Vista feature, with a suprising conclusion. Keep reading →

Someone demonstrating the use of Vista’s voice recognition to control a remote control robot. Not sure if this one is real or not as their is lots of background noise (sounds like a party going on) yet almost every command is picked up properly.

After all the unsuccessful speech recognition videos, here is one that is supposedly successful. I say supposedly because the audio is a little hard to understand, and the screen is a little hard to see.

Speech recognition seems to get a lot more attention than it deserves. It’s still far from perfect, or even from useful, so most mentions of it are to poke fun. Here is a link taking it seriously. Keep reading →

A rare video of Vista’s Speech Recognition working the way it is supposed to.