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![Smiley :)](http://www.ultrahal.com/community/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
] Hi Glen, The Mic that you got with your purchase is,
if it's the one I'm thinking of, is a headset type noise
reducing microphone. The standard desktop mics that people
usually use with their PC's are not noise reducing, they
pick up every bit of background noise, which can really
confuse any speech recognition or speech to text software
including Hals. So you are better off using the headset one.
If you want to speak to Hal with the Mic, you will find that
you will have to go through a lot of training sessions with
the speech to text engine so that it can build up a good
user speech profile. Which will in turn lead to greater
accuracy and fewer unrecognized and misunderstood words.
Until you do the training sessions, I would stick to typing
your conversations into Hal.
As to which version of Hal you have, when you first turn Hal
on there is a menu box which stays on your desktop, simply
click on the button marked "About Hal" it will then display
a splash screen animation which gives you the Version number
and copyright year. If the Hal you are running does not have
a menu box like this then it is probably Hal5. This is what the Menu Box looks like.
![](http://www.geocities.com/gamerthom/MenuBox.jpg)
I hope this is of some help to you.