Dictate, an Office plugin from Microsoft Garage that allows users to dictate words to documents, is officially being integrated into Office and Windows 10. The project was released more than two years ago and allowed users to easily input text on to their Office documents more quickly than using their keyboards.
The service is powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services, a speech recognition service that uses artificial intelligence to improve algorithms. It’s the same service that powers the text to speech in Microsoft’s other services, namely Cortana and Microsoft Translator. The service also supports dictating speech in twenty different languages, and additionally allows users to translate text into as many as sixty languages.
The project initially began in 2016 by a small team that includes software engineer for the Speech and Language team in Microsoft Cloud and AI group, Anand Desai. The team later expanded to include other members including Derik Stenerson, Principal Program Manager on the Office team.
As part of the project’s official graduation, Microsoft will be discontinuing the plugin on October 15. Users are encouraged to use the dictation programs built into Windows 10 and the various Office applications.
Do you find Window 10’s and Office 365’s dictation services useful to you? Feel free to share what you think in the comment section below.
