First of all, apologies for lack of screenshots in this part of the documentation. After I had already created my account, I tried to go back through the account creation process again to take screenshots, but Microsoft refused to allow me to create another account. So I will try my best to help you out here without screenshots.

Side note - if anyone out there going through this process for the first time wants to take screenshots for me, I would appreciate it!

These are the basic steps you need to do -

1. Create a Microsoft Azure subscription
2. Add a speech resource to your Azure account
3. Get the key and region and plug them into iRacing-TV

To create a Microsoft Azure subscription, you need to visit this page - https://azure.microsoft.com/free/cognitive-services You would click on either the “Start free” or the “Pay as you go” button to get started, and follow the instructions on the screens from there. The goal here is to get signed up with Microsoft Azure.

After you create a Microsoft Azure account, you need to add the speech-to-text service to it. To get started doing that, click on the following link - https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.CognitiveServicesSpeechServices

Here is a video I found that might be helpful -

Skip to around 2:35 where she shows you how to add speech services to your Azure account.

On the “Create Speech Services” screen, just create a new resource group – name it whatever (I just called mine “my_resource_group”), and under instance details, give it a name like “iRacing-TV”. The names don’t matter, it’s just there for you to recognize what they are for.

For the region, pick a spot close to where you are.

For the pricing tier, if you pick “free” you’re limited to a certain number of minutes per month, but you can start with that just to get everything set up and working, and switch to the paid tier later.

The important part here in the video above is at around 4:06, where she clicks on “Keys and Endpoint” – On that screen there is a “Show Keys” button – click on that to get your keys and you’ll also need the location/region. It doesn’t matter whether you use Key 1 or Key 2, just grab one of those and put that, and the region, into the iRacing-TV speech-to-text settings.