That’s unlikely after necessary checking and correcting any mistakes made by Dictate. It takes the curious line that speaking is faster than typing. Use your voice to quickly create documents, emails, notes, presentations, or even slide notes. Here’s Microsoft’s promo video for Dictate. Dictation lets you use speech-to-text to author content in Office with a microphone and reliable internet connection. A microphone test should be added because that’s crucial for any ‘speech to text’ application to work properly. In its current form, Dictate isn’t going to convert any Dragon NaturallySpeaking users. Dictate is likely to appear in more Office releases, especially for tablets and phones.

It’s nowhere near as accurate as their demo video suggests. A lot depends on your voice and microphone setup.

Right now, I’m in a quiet office, speaking clearly, about eight inches from a quality Blue Yeti microphone to record the words you’re reading. As we know, that information can be used by Microsoft itself or government agencies.ĭon’t use Dictate for anything confidential or personal.ĭictate is an interesting idea and works reasonably well. Speech-to-text technology for audio dictation has come a long way, but meeting and call transcription is a wholly more complex problem than dictating a blog post. Every word you say and text produced is recorded on Microsoft’s servers. What privacy? Not a word about this from Microsoft, which is typical. Then use Office’s Translate to convert the text you’ve approved. If you don’t know the To: language, it’s safer to use Dictate into something you can read and edit. Then the Cortana translate between languages has to be correct. Firstly, there’s the speech to text which must accurately render your words. There’s two opportunities for Dictate translation to go wrong. We have no idea if the Monty Python phrase is correctly translated into Finnish. It’s a fantastic idea, if it works properly. You’ll get better results with a headset microphone and in a quiet location. An inbuilt microphone usually isn’t enough for dictation. Go to Control Panel | Speech Recognition | Set up microphone. Our ebook Dictation and Read Aloud in Office explains all about modern dictation and speak options in Windows, Mac, Apple and Android devices.Ī good, close and clear microphone is essential to getting speech recognition to work well. In Windows 10/11 there are in-built dictation tools to use in any app. Setup Dictateĭownload was available from but that page has been disabled. It worked with Word, PowerPoint and Outlook for email writing in Office 2013 and Office 2016. Microsoft is pushing the Cortana voice features in Windows 10 and, frankly, Dictate is the first practical application we’ve seen for the technology.ĭictate is a Microsoft Garage tool, which means it’s ‘trial balloon’ for something that may, or may not, make it into fully released product. It uses the same cloud system which converts your spoken questions to Cortana. What made Dictate different is the use of Cortana voice recognition technology. Most media have just reported Microsoft’s hype, we actually tested Dictate and here’s what we’ve found. There have been several reports indicating that chatbots are getting dumber and also experiencing a decline in accuracy and user base.Microsoft released an interesting new tool for Office 2013/2016 which promised to be a major improvement on current ‘speech to text’ options. Microsoft Adding a natural and expressive touchĪI has enjoyed several wins and setbacks, with an incline to the latter.

Whether it is writing emails in Gmail, answering assignments, replying to chats or learning. Use your voice to type in Gmail and 1000+ other sites. Works on the largest number of websites, comes with advanced features and designed to respect your privacy. These technological advancements serve as the foundation upon which these new AI voices are built. Voice In is the most widely used speech-to-text extension on the Chrome Webstore. Our most recent projects, such as DelightfulTTS 2, and MuLanTTS, have significantly narrowed the quality gap between AI voices and professional human recordings, producing more natural and realistic voices than ever before. The speaking style of the voice resembles a conversation with an acquaintance over a cup of tea, maintaining a natural and unexaggerated tone.įurthermore, we continuously enhance our Text-to-Speech (TTS) modeling techniques to improve the quality of our AI voices. We began by crafting the persona of each voice as if it were a real person who is friendly and optimistic about life, always eager to assist others and share intriguing or practical knowledge.

Speech to text program for office