Speech recognition has come a long way. Most people speak quicker than they type, but Office has yet to fully embrace speech recognition. Dictate aims to change this – it’s a free plugin for Word, Outlook and PowerPoint that taps into Cortana’s speech-recognition engine to give you the power to dictate documents, emails and presentations. Download MacSpeech Dictate International for Mac to speech recognition solution with multi-language support. Your Mac downloads dictation dictionaries for the selected language(s). 5 (Optional) Open the Shortcut pop-up menu to choose a key command for starting dictation. Select Off to activate dictation with apps’ Edit menus, or select Customize to specify a key command that isn’t in the list. Voice Control uses the Siri speech-recognition engine for US English only. Other languages and dialects use the speech-recognition engine previously available with Enhanced Dictation. If you're on a business or school network that uses a proxy server, Voice Control might not be able to download. Optimized For Mac Speech And VOIP The UAC - USB Audio Class device drivers built into MacOS make USB speech recognition headsets with mic instantly usable without needing to install any software. Simply select the device in Apple's System Preferences Sound pane.
Speech recognition has come a long way. Most people speak quicker than they type, but Office has yet to fully embrace speech recognition. Dictate aims to change this – it’s a free plugin for Word, Outlook and PowerPoint that taps into Cortana’s speech-recognition engine to give you the power to dictate documents, emails and presentations.
Dictate is produced by Microsoft’s Garage arm, which houses small, self-contained teams who tinker with new technology. This means it’s low on fancy features, but high on key functionality.
Installation is simple enough, and then you’ll find a new Dictate tab on the Office ribbon. Select it and there’s a threadbare collection of options. First, set the 'From' drop-down to match your language and region (20 languages, plus regional variations, are supported), so Dictate can understand you better. The 'To' drop-down allows you to translate your dictation into another language if you wish – over 60 are supported out of the box, using Bing’s translation engine.
Finally, click the 'Manual Punctuation' button if you’d rather control punctuation through phrases like 'period' and 'question mark' rather than have Dictate attempt to automatically punctuate as you speak (it’s surprisingly good, but only works with English so far).
Dictate works with your default mic, so you’ll need to set that up via the Sounds icon in the Taskbar Notification area, then it’s just a case of clicking the Start button and you can start dictating. A response bar in the Dictation tab shows you if your voice is being picked up, and then reasonably quickly words will start to appear.
Dictate works reasonably well, but mistakes will be made, and you’ll need to keep an eye as you go – you can still type while dictating, so it’s up to you if you want to try correcting yourself while you carry on.
This download is for 32-bit versions of Office. Click here to get the 64-bit version (find out which version of Office you’re running from the File ribbon – choose Account and click 'About Word').
Verdict:
Dictate does what it says on the tin – and by tapping into Cortana, it’s guaranteed to deliver more than passable results.
Dragon Dictation makes it possible to transform voice to text and put your thoughts down anywhere anytime. All you need is the app installed on Windows, Mac, iPhone or Android phone and your voice. Let’s have a look what Dragon software you’d better choose and how to correctly use Dragon Dictation app for smartphones.
SEE ALSO: How to Turn Audio into Text Free with VoiceBase
SEE ALSO: How to Convert Audio Files
How to Dragon Dictate on iPhone and Android
On the official Nuance Communications site you will find apps for home users, journalists and bloggers as well as apps for business users, drivers and medical workers. The one we observed is Dragon Dictation. It’s great for every day using. You can download Dragon Dictation app for iPhone or Android absolutely free or charge.
- Open the Dragon Dictation app.
- Set the Region you are in. It is required to precise the language of recognition.
- Choose the Tap and Dictate button and begin to dictate.
- When you are through, tap the Stop button. You will see a written text of your message. You can correct it using the keyboard.
- Now you can copy the text to carry it over to any other app.
At the same time you may publish the dictated text on Twitter, send a message or an email with it.
If you want to change the language, go to Settings and choose the right one there. You can set other features like name recognition here.
Now, let’s run a test and check what this app can actually do.
Dragon Dictation Test
Dictation Software For Mac
To make sure that Dragon app is as brilliant as it sounds, we dictated 5 text pieces to check the quality of recognition.
1. The first one was a short phrase from a famous Lullaby:
Twinkle, twinkle, Little Star.
Great result, but that was easy.
2. The second one was a long and sophisticated tongue twister:
Whether the weather is right, or whether the weather is not
Whether the weather is warm, or whether the weather is hot,
We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not
As you can see, the written variant is not 100% correct.
3. The third piece is the description of Freemake Blog. We didn’t train these phrases so they looked natural with pauses and different intonation.
Freemake Blog is the place where we, Freemake team, share our findings of new and interesting apps, software and websites across the Web. Here you’ll learn about latest tech trends, visit hot destinations on the Net, get acquainted with web influencers and laugh at our funny discoveries. Feel free to contact Freemake Blog team.
Unfortunately, the app fails here.
4. The fourth one is said in Scottish English:
Dinnae fuss, Gonninae dae that!
Which means “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that”. And it was a complete fail. So as it is impossible in the general mode, for dialects recognition create a profile and modify Accent.
Well, if you live in Scotland, try to speak general English when you use Dragon Dictation app.
5. And the last one is a French phrase we decided to try a different language.
“J’ai le mal de la Seine” – I adore river the Seine.
This time the app showed a nice result again.
Dragon Tips and Tricks for Advanced Users
Using Dragon app for a long time but your text leaves much to be desired? Try these tips and tricks to improve the quality of your speech recognition:
- Don’t dictate if the background is noisy.
- Position the microphone near your mouth.
- Try to use the same volume, pace and tone every time you dictate.
- If you want to use punctuation, say the items’ names like comma or full stop.
While dictating, you are welcome to use the following voice commands:
Give me help, Set for Arial (or any other font), Bold that, Delete previous character/5 words, Spell, Select “Twinkle” (or any other word), New line/paragraph, Undo that, etc.
To see the complete list of commands, ask the Dragon app: “What can I say?”.
The Good:
- Dragon App is free for smartphones where you most need it.
- It is really fast at typing your words.
- Your text can be easily shared on social networks.
- Can be used on the go.
- The interface is stylish and user-friendly, so you don’t need to be a software pro to use it.
- The app is very useful for students as they can easily epitomize their lectures.
- It is as well helpful for language learning as you can obtain a right pronunciation using it.
The Bad:
- No note storage.
- You need a reliable Internet connection for dictating.
- If you use 3G or 4G, it might lead to expensive network charges.
- There is no button to erase all the dictated text so you have to delete it with the keyboard, which is not so convenient.
- The result isn’t always precise.
- The proper pronouns are mostly not correct.
Verdict:
As you see the Dragon Dictation App is the most suitable for short and prepared phrases. Nonetheless, it is a great app to write your ideas down hands-free.
Dragon Desktop Options
Apart from numerous iPhone and Android apps, Nuance Communications also develop software for computers. Dragon Software in its turn is not free. There are four options for Windows users:
- Dragon Home for $74.99 is great for bloggers and students for dictating lectures, blog posts and varies to-do’s.
- Dragon Premium for $174.99 has more options than Dragon Home. For example, it lets you dictate via Bluetooth set. Dragon Premium is perfect for capturing documents, surf the Net, send emails, etc.
- Dragon Professional Individual for $300 gives powerful customization features and is a must-have for working with business documents.
- Dragon legal Individual for $500 includes a specialized legal vocabulary and lets you work with contracts, briefs and other docs just by using your voice.
Apple Mac Dictation
Those who prefer to use Mac can benefit from two options:
- Dragon for Mac for $300 that is fully customizable and can work with presentations, emails, spreadsheets and, of course, documents.
- Dragon for Mac medical starting form $999 lets capture or improve clinical documentation fast and easily.
Check how it works on Mac:
Dragon Dictation’s working principles are similar to those of Siri, Google or Cortana, it recognizes speech and then converts it into words. It is really easy to use and can amaze you with a quick and precise result.
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