User Account Control and Speech Recognition

One of the new security features in Windows Vista is User Account Control (UAC). The concept is that every user, even members of the Administrators group, run as a non-admin. When an administrator attempts to open a program that requires administrative credentials, he or she is presented with a dialogue box and must click continue to open the program. Essentially, the dialogue box is asking if the administrator wants to elevate his or her credentials. Although many find this new feature annoying, it is a great way to ensure that malicious programs are not running in the background with my administrative credentials.

So why does this cause a problem with Speech Recognition? When the UAC dialogue box comes up, the everything on the desktop is disabled until the user either clicks on Continue or Cancel. This includes Speech Recognition. In order to enable Speech Recognition to work with UAC, you must disable a setting in the Local Security Policy or through Group Policy. The path to the setting within Local Security Policy is:

Local Policies\Security Options\User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation

Open this setting and click on "Disabled". By disabling this policy, Speech Recognition will work with the UAC. However, this does decrease the security of the UAC and is not recommended unless absolutely necessary.