Windows has a feature it doesn’t like to talk about. While the OS lets you scrawl notes with a stylus, log in with you face (or secure the Web) via Windows Hello, and even order Cortana to set a reminder, what it’s not so eager for you to do, apparently, is use its speech recognition engine to issue commands or take voice dictation.
The reason for its silence may go back 10 years, to when Microsoft product manager Shanen Boettcher demonstrated voice dictation inside Windows Vista—and flubbed it. The technology kept a low profile after that, and today, few users know you can dictate a document within Windows.
