For many of us, typing takes up a lot of time and every day, we are writing emails, drafting documents, sending instant messages and creating presentations.
You can speak much faster than you can type, so what if you could type with your voice? With Dictate, a new project released through the Microsoft Garage, you can.
The add-in works with Outlook, Word and PowerPoint for Windows and converts speech to text using the state-of-the-art speech recognition and artificial intelligence imbued in Microsoft Cognitive Services, including the Bing Speech API and Microsoft Translator.
The add-in enables transcribing voice in more than 20 languages and also supports real-time text translation of up to 60 languages meaning users’ can speak in their native language, while Dictate types it out in another.
Spoken commands give users the ability to create new lines, delete, add punctuation and more to format the text.
Dictate was initially built as a prototype during an annual Microsoft hackathon. The project quickly grew its fan base with more than 1,500 employees in more than 40 countries.
Dictate presently works in Office and supports commands like "new line", “stop dictation” and "enter" to give more control while dictating. With two modes of punctuations -- auto and manual for English, users’ can let the software insert punctuation automatically as they speak or they can enter them manually.
Dictate works on Office 32-bit and 64-bit, requires that users are using Windows 8.1 or later, Office 2013 or higher, and the .Net framework 4.5.0 or later.
