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Here are the punctuation characters and symbols you can dictate, according to Microsoft: To Insert This: Say "period," "comma," "new line," "new paragraph," or whatever action you want to take. As you do with other dictation programs and apps, just speak what you need it to do. You can also issue commands to dictate punctuation and start a new paragraph.
#SPEECH TO TEXT WINDOWS 10 IN WORD 2016 HOW TO#
Let's check out how to use speech recognition and dictation in Windows. Once the dictation is active, you can dictate text as well as punctuation marks, special characters, and cursor movements. More recent versions of Windows 10 also offer a dictation feature you can use to create documents, emails, and other files via the sound of your voice. The feature even serves up a reference guide so you know what commands and other tasks you can throw at Windows via your voice. But it's available to anyone who'd like to try talking to Windows instead. The speech-recognition feature can be especially helpful for people with disabilities who can't use the keyboard or mouse.
#SPEECH TO TEXT WINDOWS 10 IN WORD 2016 UPDATE#
Or dictate text on Windows 10 Fall Creators Update or later.Īfter teaching Windows to understand the sound of your voice, you can then talk to the OS to get it to respond to your commands. You can do that in Windows 10 through Cortana, but you can also talk to Windows 10 and previous versions of Windows using the built-in speech recognition. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Softwareĭid you know you can talk to Windows to issue commands, open applications, dictate text, and perform other tasks?.It will then commence reading, highlighting the current line or phrase in blue and the word it’s actually pronouncing in yellow. If you wanted to have the computer read out the story, the easiest way is to simply click and select the first word or paragraph, then right click on the selection: Now to use it, simply right click on a text passage.įor example, here’s an article from MSN.com about James Cameron: I prefer Zira as she reminds me of Alexa! You can try all three voices and you can tweak the speed to make it faster or slower when reading just make your choices and click on “Preview voice” to hear how he/she sounds. Interestingly, though, Zira is “Messenger” in Hebrew. It’s a bit curious that they have two such mainstream male names and “Zira”. Most likely, the speech language is what you want, but you can definitely experiment with different settings if your Mom is multi-lingual! Where this gets interesting is the second section, “Text-to-speech”, because you can choose from a couple of different voices:
To do that, do a Cortana system search for “ speech“:Īs highlighted, choose “Change text-to-speech settings” and you’ll get the following options and settings: Fortunately that’s why we have audio books! 🙂Īnyway, your Mom’s computer has everything you need to get this working, but you do need to enable the feature before you can try it out.
Would I want to listen to my Win10 system read War and Peace however? Probably not. For a situation like someone who has a difficult time reading on the screen or just gets quickly fatigued it can be a life saver. Which isn’t to say that the text to speech dictation and reading system in Windows 10 isn’t very good, because it’s actually quite acceptable. Windows 10 includes the Cortana voice system which makes you think that it would be the same engine used for text to speech features, but, alas, it isn’t. Some, like Cortana and Alexa, are remarkably good and getting better all the time, but others are a bit behind, though still quite functional. While we’re not quite at the sci-fi film ideal of a computer that can chat with us and is indistinguishable from a human being, computer voices have come a long way in the last decade or so.