Originally developed as a prototype during a company hackathon, Dictate promises to convert speech to text using the same “state of the art speech recognition” technologies used by Cortana.
Microsoft’s experimental Garage unit has released its latest project, bringing “state of the art speech recognition” to the Office suite.
As its name suggests, Dictate can convert speech to text in Outlook, Word and PowerPoint, using the same speech processing and machine learning capabilities used by the Cortana digital assistant, and Microsoft Translator.
“The add-in enables transcribing voice in more than 20 languages and also supports real-time text translation of up to 60 languages, ” Microsoft explained. “Spoken commands give users the ability to create new lines, delete, add punctuation and more to format the text.”
Microsoft said that Dictate was created as a prototype during a company hackathon, but quickly gained popularity among its staff, with over 1,500 employees in more than 40 countries using it.
You can download Dictate here for 32-bit and 64-bit Office 2013 and Office 2016, on Windows 8.1 or later. Check out the video below to see Dictate in action:
Source: Microsoft
