As a little girl, I often found myself in my family's basement, doing battle with a dragon. I wasn't gaming or playing pretend: My dragon was a piece of enterprise voice-dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, launched in 1997 (and purchased by my dad, an early adopter). As a kid, I was enchanted by the idea of a computer that could type for you. The premise was simple: Wear a headset, pull up the software, and speak. Your words would fill a document on-screen without your hands having to bear the indignity of actually typing.

If you're using Microsoft's word processor on a Windows computer, you have several voice-recognition options. This section will address three of them, mostly focusing on the Windows Speech Recognition program built into this operating system. The integrated voice-recognition service will work on any Windows application, including Microsoft Word. To launch it, type "windows speech recognition" into the search box on the taskbar, then click the app when it appears. The first time you run this software, you'll need to teach the utility to recognize your voice.

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. If there were ever a time for Windows to try again, though, it would seem to be now, when advances in computers and artificial intelligence provide a much better foundation for the technology.