Microsoft has added another feature to its long list of deprecated Windows features. Today, the company has announced that Windows speech recognition is no longer being developed. Instead, it is being replaced by Voice Access on Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 11 22H2.
On its website, the company writes:
Windows speech recognition is deprecated and is no longer being developed. This feature is being replaced with voice access. Voice access is available for Windows 11, version 22H2, or later devices.
A few days ago, Microsoft highlighted the Accessibility features it added in 2023, including Voice Access. Other such features include Live Captions, Narrator Voices, and Narrator Extensions. You can read about these in our dedicated article.
About the feature, Microsoft writes :
Voice access in Windows 11 is a new experience that enables everyone, including people with mobility disabilities, to control their PC and author text using their voice. For example, you can open and switch between apps, browse the web, and read and author emails using your voice. Voice access uses modern, on-device speech recognition to accurately recognize speech and works without an internet connection.
For those not old enough to know, Microsoft introduced Speech Recognition as a separate application back in 2006 with Windows Vista in order to make the OS more accessible. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it did not foresee threat actors abusing the feature.
Back in 2016, Microsoft hit a couple of impressive milestones in regard to speech recognition. In September of the year, Microsoft announced that it achieved the lowest word error rate, though IBM again beat that a year later in 2017 and by a fair margin too. Following that, in October of 2016, Microsoft announced that it had achieved human-like speech recognition too.
You can read about all the deprecated features Microsoft announced recently at this link.