There is quite a bit of delay between saying the word and when it gets copied to the search field. Any way to speed that up?
The only perceivable delay should be the speech recognition engine processing what it heard, which doesn't normally take very long (a few hundred ms perhaps).
Do keep in mind that speech recognition in general works best with predefined phrases. While the Microsoft speech recognition engine can interpret speech freely without context, it'll be much less accurate than when it's matching what it heard to a list of predefined commands.
I think I saw something about it showing you the letters 1 at a time while you're saying something?
That's not something the Microsoft speech recognition engine does, as far as I'm aware.
Also it doesn't let me use the word dictation when searching. I just get unrecognized " 'dictation'
If the dictation mode is active, that word should be recognized like any other.
You do need to pause between triggering the command and speaking your dictation phrase, I.E. wait for the "Recognized" log entry to appear before you start speaking again.