Dictation gives you the ability to talk to your iPhone or iPad instead of typing. You can access it almost anytime your keyboard is on screen, so if you really want you never have to type a text, email, note, or even Facebook message ever again. How to enable and disable dictation on iPhone and iPad. Launch the Settings app from your Home screen. Tap General.
Jun 22, 2017 - Microsoft's new Cortana-powered plug-in adds speech recognition to. Used in Cortana, Dictate will quickly turn your spoken words into text. This video demonstrates how to enable and use the text-to-speech feature in Word 2016 for Mac. Skip navigation Sign in. Using Dictation in Microsoft Word for Mac - Duration: 2:16.
Tap Keyboard. Tap on the On/Off switch next to Enable Dictation. Green means on, and gray means off. How to use dictation on iPhone and iPad. Launch any app that uses the keyboard.
I will use Messages for this example. Tap on the text field to bring up the keyboard. Tap on the Dictation button. It's the microphone between the Emoji button and Space Bar. Start speaking. You should notice the words come up as you go. Tap Done when you are done speaking.
Alternatively, if your microphone isn't picking up any sound for a short amount of time it will shut off itself. Dictation isn't perfect, so make sure you are speaking loud and clear in order to get the most accurate results. It works best when your iPhone or iPad is connected to a Wi-Fi network, and it won't work if you have no reception of any kind. If you care about proper sentence structure at all, you'll need to speak any punctuation. For example, 'Hi mom exclaimation point I'm coming by later period Do you want me to pick anything up from the store question mark' Questions? Anything things else you want to know about dictation on the iPhone and iPad?
Let us know in the comments below!
Microsoft has released an interesting new tool for Office 2013/2016 which promises to be a major improvement on current ‘speech to text’ options. Most media have just reported Microsoft’s hype, we’ve actually tested Dictate and here’s what we’ve found. What makes Dictate different is the use of Cortana voice recognition technology.
It uses the same cloud system which converts your spoken questions to Cortana. Microsoft is pushing the Cortana voice features in Windows 10 and, frankly, Dictate is the first practical application we’ve seen for the technology. Dictate is a Microsoft Garage tool, which means it’s ‘trial balloon’ for something that may, or may not, make it into fully released product. It seems quite stable for a Garage project, though it has some understandable curiosities. It works with Word, PowerPoint and Outlook for email writing in Office 2013 and Office 2016.
A good, close and clear microphone is essential to getting speech recognition to work well. Setup and check your microphone.
Go to Control Panel Speech Recognition Set up microphone. An inbuilt microphone usually isn’t enough for dictation. You’ll get better results with a headset microphone and in a quiet location. Unlike some speech-to-text systems, Dictate/Cortana doesn’t have a ‘training’ mode. That lets the software get better at recognizing your particular voice. Dictation tab Start Word and you have a new Dictation tab. The default language settings should be correct (copied from Word/Windows) but you can change to suit your needs.
Start – click this button then start speaking. Click again to stop dictation. From – choose the language and variant you’ll be speaking – eg English US, UK, India, Australian etc.
To – the language that will be typed. That does NOT have to be the language you’re speaking, see Translation below. Manual Punctuation – in English only, you have the choice of Automatic or Manual punctuation. Automatic – Dictate will add punctuation for you. Manual – certain phrases will be converted into punctuation characters instead of words.
Full Stop or Period. New Line (strictly speaking, creates a new paragraph). Question Mark. Open Quote. Close Quote.
Colon. Comma Speech to Text – Dictate We tried Dictate with a section from one of our favorite stand-up comedy pieces of all time: Woody Allen’s The Moose. Peter read it ‘straight’ to give Dictate a fair test. It didn’t go well, as you’ll see from the highlights we’ve added to show the many errors. As you can see, Dictate had a lot of trouble with Peter’s ‘comma’ and ‘full stop’. It seems that Dictate in Automatic punctuation mode ignores any spoken attempts to punctuate even when they agree with what Dictate is doing eg ‘full stop.”.
On the plus side, Dictate can handle speech at a reasonable pace. It saves/caches what you say then adds text in batches, sometimes many lines at a time. You can type while you’re dictating, to add text or punctuation as you go. Don’t be put off by the stray characters on the preview line. They disappear in the final text.
If there’s no Internet access, you’ll get this mysterious error “Unable to create MicrophoneRecoClient” Translation with Dictate A neat Dictate trick is translation. You speak in one language and the typed text comes out in another language. Just choose the Language Option To that you want.
It’s a fantastic idea, if it works properly. We have no idea if the Monty Python phrase is correctly translated into Finnish. There’s two opportunities for Dictate translation to go wrong. Firstly, there’s the speech to text which must accurately render your words. Then the Cortana translate between languages has to be correct. If you don’t know the To: language, it’s safer to use Dictate into something you can read and edit. Then use Office’s Translate to convert the text you’ve approved.
Privacy What privacy? Not a word about this from Microsoft, which is typical. Every word you say and text produced is recorded on Microsoft’s servers. As we know, that information can be used by Microsoft itself or government agencies. Don’t use Dictate for anything confidential or personal. Dictate is an interesting idea and works reasonably well.
A lot depends on your voice and microphone setup. It’s nowhere near as accurate as their demo video suggests. Dictate is likely to appear in more Office releases, especially for tablets and phones. In its current form, Dictate isn’t going to convert any users. The documentation needs to be better. A microphone test should be added because that’s crucial for any ‘speech to text’ application to work properly. The video promo Here’s Microsoft’s promo video for Dictate.
It takes the curious line that speaking is faster than typing. That’s unlikely after necessary checking and correcting any mistakes made by Dictate.