# How to stop speech recognition from loading in Word 2002?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-stop-speech-recognition-from-loading-in-word-2002/131709>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 10, 2002, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-stop-speech-recognition-from-loading-in-word-2002/131709 "2002-10-10T18:05:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Opus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/858c86/32.png) [@Opus1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Opus1)\
**Post date:** [October 10, 2002, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-stop-speech-recognition-from-loading-in-word-2002/131709/1 "2002-10-10T18:05:23Z")

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I’m going to call microsoft for help on this, but I thought I’d ask here first since I’m currently at school and want to get this fixed ASAP.

A few days ago, I accidentally clicked on something that made Word 2002 think I wanted to do speech recognition. Now, whenever I open Word, it has the Speech Recognition option under Tools already checked. This slows it down incredibly, and sometimes prevents it from loading entirely. I can sometimes disable it by unclicking Speech Recognition, but again, this sometimes just locks it up. If I succeed, all future session of Word work fine, but when I reboot, it’s back to the same old crap.

Could somebody please tell me how to reset word so that it doesn’t ever try to load this speech recognition crap ever again? Hell, I’d prefer to competely uninstall that component, but I figure that’ll be tough.

For now, I’m stuck to running winword.exe /a, which loads Word in default mode, without any options or extras. Thanks in advance for any help.

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**Author:** ![DarrenS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)\
**Post date:** [October 10, 2002, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-stop-speech-recognition-from-loading-in-word-2002/131709/2 "2002-10-10T18:41:58Z")

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Try searching Google groups ([groups.google.com](http://groups.google.com)) for “microsoft word disable speech recognition” - there are a lot of people asking how to do this and quite a few explanations on how to get rid of it. The links are a bit crazy (several lines long) so I didn’t post any here.

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**Author:** ![sigSEGV](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5a626/32.png) [@sigSEGV](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sigSEGV)\
**Post date:** [October 10, 2002, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-stop-speech-recognition-from-loading-in-word-2002/131709/3 "2002-10-10T22:56:07Z")

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I had the same problem. Funky bug in Office XP. I would turn it all off, reboot the machine, and then it would be back, without going into word or anything. Slowed my 1.33 Ghz machine to a crawl too. I don’t remember what ended up fixing it.

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**Author:** ![Number](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/number/32/242_2.png) [@Number](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Number)\
**Post date:** [October 11, 2002, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-stop-speech-recognition-from-loading-in-word-2002/131709/4 "2002-10-11T02:45:29Z")

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Microsoft has a Knowledge Base [article](http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q295947) about troubleshooting speech recognition.