Backing Up Your Speech Profile With Windows Easy Transfer Wizard

Now that you’ve been using Windows Speech Recognition for Vista a while, and hopefully the WSR Macro facility, you’ve probably noticed that the recognition engine is getting better about understanding you, which means you’re saying “correct *that+” less and less. Good! That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

What you need to do now, and periodically afterwards, is to backup this maturing speech profile and all it’s associated data. Why? Well, what if your system crashes? You’ll have to start back at square one and retrain all those misunderstandings again, one-by-one. Not a good thought, huh. Or, you may want to move this increasingly accurate speech profile to another Windows Vista computer. No problem. Until more sophisticated tools become available, you can do this with the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard which is built-in to Vista.

Rob Chambers [a Microsoft employee who currently works in the Speech Recognition Group] has explained how to do this on his blog and I’d like to expand on this a bit with step-by-step instructions and actual screenshots.

Here’s the quick-list of his instructions:

To Use The Windows Easy Transfer Wizard: 1. Click Start 2. Type "Easy Transfer" into the search box 3. Click on "Windows Easy Transfer" 4. Click "Next" 5. Click "Start a new transfer" 6. Click "My old computer" 7. Pick a way to transfer the files (transfer cable, using a network, or removable media) 8. Answer the specific questions about that mode of transfer 9. Click "Advanced options" on the "What do you want to transfer" page 10. Uncheck all the items in the list 11. Expand the node in the tree that corresponds to your log on user name 12. Expand the "Windows Settings" node 13. Expand the "Sound and Speech Recognition" node 14. Check the "Speech Recognition" node 15. Click "Next"

Here’s the blog entry: http://blogs.msdn.com/robch/archive/2007/02/15/transferring-windows-speech-recognition- profiles-from-one-machine-to-another.aspx

Let’s get started with our expanded step-by-step guide (with pictures!) 

1. Click the Start button and type in “easy transfer” 2. For future reference, right click on “Windows Easy Transfer”, then choose “Pin to Start Menu”. That way, it will be there, on your start menu, the next time you need it. After you do this, go ahead an click on “Windows Easy Transfer”. 3. You’ll be greeted with the User Account Control (if you have this security feature turned on) asking for your permission to continue. Click “Continue”.

The next screen to pop up will be the Windows Easy Transfer greeting screen

After clicking ‘Next’, depending on whether or not you have any other programs running, you may see this screen. If want to ‘Close All’ just click the button, or exit the Wizard, close all of your open programs and restart.

Choose ‘Start a new Transfer’

Click ‘My old computer’

Choose ‘Transfer directly using a network connection’ (don’t worry about the wording, it’s confusing and you don’t have to be connected to a network).

Choose ‘Copy to and from a network location’

Provide a filename and path to where you’d like to save your speech profile file. Give it a name that’s meaningful like SpeechProfileBackup_07-09-08.MIG. The .MIG extension is important. Make sure you add that. It’s also a good idea to include the date as part of your filename. That way you’ll have a record of when you backed it up last. If you’d like to password protect this backup file, you can do that here. Even though Microsoft “recommends” password protecting this file, that recommendation really only applies if you were backing up password and user account stuff. Your speech recognition profile however, doesn’t contain this type of confidential information. Once you’re satisfied with the filename and folder location, click ‘Next’.

You’ll now see a screen that’s determining what is on your hard drive that can be backed up.

Now choose ‘Advanced options’

This screen is where you’ll select what you’d like to backup.

Before clicking ‘Next’, uncheck all the checked items and expand the Windows Settings group

Expand the ‘Sound and Speech Recognition’ Group and select ‘Speech Recognition’

Once you’ve selected just ‘Speech Recognition’, click ‘Next’.

Your Speech Recognition Profile backup is underway. Sit back for a moment and relax.

We’re done!

So, now that you have a single file named whatever you named it and it has the .MIG extension, you can easily move or copy that file to another Vista computer and then double-click the file and the Transfer Wizard will open up and guide you through the restore process. Once done, you’ll have the same Speech Recognition Profile(s) available on your ‘new’ computer as you do on your ‘old’. Of course you can always restore this backed up profile to your existing computer the same way. Just double-click on the .MIG file.

Run through the procedure again (or as many times as you like), you can create multiple backups, no problem, just give them a different name if you’d like multiple copies. Doing this several times will give you increased confidence about backing up your speech profile.

Whew! That’s a lot of work, I know, but you can now rest assured all your hard work training your computer to recognize your voice will not be lost.

An advanced note: Once you have a backup (or two), you can experiment with your profile, train it with a long text passage, for instance, or even create a new profile with the confidence that if “something happens”, you can always restore the file you know was working properly.