@Gumbie - If you are using Windows' speech app as Pfeil has indicated, the speech engine that you are using is exactly the same, with the same training. The only difference is that the instance of the speech engine that VA uses is focused based on the commands that you provide. For example, if you provide a command called, 'kneeboard', VA cranks up an instance of the speech engine and tells it to focus itself around, 'kneeboard'. If you say, 'kneeboard' and it comes back as, 'need board', that means that the speech engine, although being told to focus on 'kneeboard' is having trouble with this situation for some reason. There could be any number of factors contributing to that situation that you can read about in this thread:
https://forum.voiceattack.com/smf/index.php?topic=1635.0 (It's a bit of a read, but it has helped many over the years both understand what is going on, but also help prepare or fix their PCs to work better with Windows' speech recognition). Again, it's a very simple mechanism - give the speech engine a set of words to focus on. Outside of that, the speech engine is rather blind to anything else - it kind of makes best guesses to anything else that is said. So, if it's having trouble negotiating, 'kneeboard' even though it has a direct instruction to do so, it's not getting it for some reason, so, it yields, 'need board' as its best guess. It could be anything from hardware to command weight to speaking accent to installed drivers and software. You'll want to take a run through that thread to see if anything might help. I did notice that you've had VA for a rather long time - if this is a new situation, you'll really want to look at hardware, drivers and noise reduction software as those can trip you up unexpectedly.
Given all that, and as a testimony to environment being a factor, I added a command just now called, 'kneeboard'. It hits at 100% (with 20 tries) with a confidence of 95 and above without any additional training. I've had cases where the speech engine had real trouble with one of my commands - no matter what I did, it couldn't seem to get the word right even with additional training. What I did to solve the problem was look at what the speech engine was favoring as a result and using it, as it doesn't cost much to do this. In your case, I would make a command where the spoken phrase looks like 'kneeboard;need board;need boar' - that will trigger the command for any of those. I know that's not what you want to hear, but again, there's a reason why it's not getting it and it's going to boil down to something in your setup. This is a way to get around that if you don't want to spend a bunch of time trying to figure it out.
Hope that helps!