Lagging Response

One irritating problem is that when I press an icon for a transcription, it takes a few seconds for my voice to be recorded. As a result, the first one to five words are completely ignored, which completely messes up the transcript. Is there some way of making the whole process faster? My XPS laptop has terrible function keys. Is anyone using a USB‑based external keypad? Will this speed up the responsiveness at the start of a transcription?