Microsoft Dictate - State-of-the-art speech recognition for Office

[Arthur]

It's free too!

 

Website / FAQ / Download

 

You type all day long to get things done. Responding to email, writing documents and creating presentations to communicate your ideas. Sometimes, this gets tiring. Your fingers get sore, your wrists hurt. Or, maybe using a keyboard is difficult for you.

 

Do you ever wish you could just talk to your computer and have it write for you? Research shows you can speak much faster than you can type. What if you could type with your voice?

 

Meet Dictate, a Microsoft Garage project.

 

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. Download it today and start writing with your voice!

 

Key features include:

 

• 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
  

 

[TechMonkey]

Anyone got it working yet? I've installed but it can't find a microphone. Tried a Bluetooth headset and a web cam microphone but it just errors out.

[thimon]

Worked fine here, pretty good for a free add-in. Didn't have to calibrate any microphone or audio setting.

[Arthur]

I've installed but it can't find a microphone.

Did you get this error?

 

 

Perhaps it has something to do with the security settings (e.g. macros being disabled etc.)?

[andy_b]

I tried it, just got "Unable to start", was on Windows 7 though:

 

Windows 8.1 or later, Office 2013 or later, .Net Framework 4.5.0 or later.

[TechMonkey]

Did you get this error?

 

 

Perhaps it has something to do with the security settings (e.g. macros being disabled etc.)?

Yes that's the error. I'll investigate in that direction. It didn't ask about macros and I'm sure we are set to ask not disable totally.

[TechMonkey]

Worked it out. Proxy Authentication needed as it uses azure to interpret. So I added https://officedictate.azure-api.net/ to the bypass list and all happy!

[unixman_again]

I can't get it to work. We see "Unable to start speech recognition client". The built in windows speech recognition works fine.

[unixman_again]

I found out that you have to have Cortana running for this to work.

[Bagdasar]

Worked it out. Proxy Authentication needed as it uses azure to interpret. So I added https://officedictate.azure-api.net/ to the bypass list and all happy!

 

Interesting. Where is the bypass list?

Edited September 21, 2017 by Bagdasar

[Arthur]

Where is the bypass list?

That depends entirely on which proxy server you are using.