Microsoft recently announced a new feature for Office that allows users to type with their voice, and it's all possible thanks to a new project from Microsoft Garage.
Simply called Dictate, the new dictation feature for Microsoft Office was developed by the company's Garage division and is based on the Bing Speech API that is also used by the digital assistant Cortana.
Additionally, it uses Microsoft Translator to offer support in 20 languages, while real-time text translation is available for 60 languages, with more to be added in upcoming updates.
“For many of us, typing takes up a lot of time. Every day, you write emails, draft documents, send instant messages, and create presentations. Originally built as a prototype during an annual Microsoft hackathon, the project quickly grew its fan base to more than 1,500 employees in more than 40 countries,” Microsoft explains.
With this feature, users can simply convert their spoken words to text in Microsoft Office apps like Word and Outlook, but the company says Dictate also supports commands to create new lines, delete, add punctuation, and format text.
Supported commands are: newline, delete, dictation break, question mark, open window, close quote, comma, and more are expected to be added as the company improves Dictate.
At this point, the add-in is only available for Word, PowerPoint , and Outlook, but there's no doubt that there are already plans to bring it to other platforms.
The add-in requires Windows 8.1 or later, Office 2013 or later, .NET Framework 4.5.0 or later, and can only be used on Windows. 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available, depending on the build of Office.
If your system meets the above requirements, you can download Dictate for Microsoft Office using this link, but keep in mind that this is only the first public release and some things may not work entirely as expected. So, give it some time, send feedback, and future releases should be substantially better.
