Hands-free typing comes to Microsoft Office

Microsoft has just launched Dictate, an add-in (i.e., a plug-in) that converts speech to text for core Microsoft Office apps, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It’s available for both 32-bit and 64-bit Office, but you do need at least Office 2013, Windows 8.1, and .Net Framework 4.5.0. No Office 365 subscription is required, which is great.

Born out of a Microsoft Garage project, Dictate supports 20 languages for dictation, and can do real-time translation to 60 languages. It also supports commands like “New Line” to take the cursor to the next line, “Delete” to remove the last line, “Full Stop” to insert a period, etc.

For what it’s worth, Dictate uses speech recognition and AI imbued in Microsoft Cognitive Services, including the Bing Speech API and Microsoft Translator. Which is to say it’s quite a bit different from the speech-to-text engine that’s already been on Windows for years.