How to type effortlessly with your voice using Microsoft Dictate

Everyone wants to talk now, or rather use AI-powered speech-to-text to save the typing work. So it's no surprise that Microsoft now has a potentially groundbreaking attempt at speech to text, born out of its own private testing and development.?

Microsoft Dictate is a new experimental application from Microsoft Garage that brings voice dictation to Windows versions of Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint. You only need to download the 2MB Light plugin for the ribbon to start.

Go Hands-Free in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint

Microsoft Dictate started life as a hackathon project. I guess the Redmond guys wanted to save some time on emails, long text documents, and quick PowerPoint demos. After all, it's not always fun to rely on the keyboard to say things like "Implement infrastructure to improve cognitive load on virtual machines.."

Install this handy program and start working from its own tab on the ribbon.

1. Reveal Dictation tab on the tape. Click the microphone icon to start speech and text recognition.
2. Dictation software picks up your speech patterns and translates them into text on the page. You can also see the comments in real time in the field.
3. Quickly switch to the language options if you want to spell something in a different language. Dictate supports more than 20 languages ​​for dictation and can handle Real-time translation of 60 languages. .
4. Nine specific voice commands helps you create new lines, delete, add punctuation, and more to format text.
5. Toggle between manual scoring and automatic scoring for better control.
6. Microsoft Dictate is compatible with Windows 8.1 or later, Office 2013 or later, using the .NET Framework 4.5.0 or later.

Take an experimental shot at productivity

Microsoft Dictate uses the same infrastructure that runs the successful Cortana. Cutting-edge speech recognition and artificial intelligence built into Microsoft Cognitive Services include the Bing Speech API and Microsoft Translator.

The nascent effort will only get better over time, assuming Microsoft continues with the project. For now, more advanced speech-to-text software doesn't need to shake its "cleverness" - It remains a garage project for the foreseeable future.

Want to try something similar outside of Microsoft Office? Review voice typing in Google Docs How voice typing is the best feature in Google Docs How voice typing is the best feature in Google Docs Voice recognition has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Earlier this week, Google finally introduced voice typing in Google Docs. But it's good? Let's find out! Read more.

Is Dictate among the Microsoft services you didn't know about before? Have you ever used voice typing to write an entire document?