Voice Dictation in Microsoft Word is about to get a lot better

Dictate for Microsoft Office on Windows will be retired as an add-on on 15th October, to then be officially integrated into Office 365 and Windows 10.

The plugin from Microsoft Garage is powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services, which is the AI-powered speech recognition service.  The use of artificial intelligence means constantly improving algorithms, and therefore a progressively more adaptable, reliable tool.

Dictate is an Office add-in for Windows Outlook, Word and PowerPoint that converts speech to text using the state-of-the-art speech recognition behind Cortana and Microsoft Translator.

The key features of the app are:

• Highly accurate speech to text
• Supports 29 spoken languages
• Real-time translation to 60 languages
• Commands like “new line”, “stop dictation” and “enter” to give more control while dictating
• Two modes of punctuations: Auto and manual (with commands like “Question mark”, “Period”, “Exclamation mark”, “Comma”) Visual feedback to indicate speech is being processed

Check out a brief demonstration by Microsoft:

Source: onmsft.com