Major operating systems, such as Windows and macOS on PCs, and Android and iOS on mobile devices, have speech-to-text input built in as an accessibility tool, but if you’re dealing with a lot of typing, it might be helpful to take a step back and take advantage of this feature. The accuracy isn’t 100% – not even 90% in most cases – and Indian accents or rooms with background noises like ceiling fans and air conditioners can further confuse it, but the results are useful enough that after a long day at the office, switching to voice can help you put off carpal tunnel for the rest of the day.
Whether you’re using a Windows PC, Mac, Android device, or iPhone, here are the different ways you can enable voice dictation. Here are the steps you need to follow, along with some quick thoughts on the quirks of each platform.
How to enable voice input on Windows
The steps to start using voice typing on your Windows PC are simple. Following these steps will help you get started using Windows Speech Recognition, which lets you speak instead of typing, and also lets you control your computer with your voice – an essential tool for people with accessibility issues.
If you are using Windows 7, please open speech recognition by clicking start button > All programs > Accessories > Easy access > Windows speech recognition.
On Windows 8, press Win key (looks like the Windows logo) + Q. In the search box, type speech recognitionthen click Windows speech recognition Let’s get started.
On Windows 10, go to control Panel > Easy access > speech recognition > Start speech recognition.
Then follow these steps:
- Say “Start listening” or click microphone button to activate listening mode.
- Open the program you want to use or select the text box where you want to dictate text.
- Speak the text you want dictated.
That’s it!
To correct text, you just say “Correct” and then edit the last sentence you said. In use, the effect is very good. On Windows 7 with the language set to English (UK), we encountered no major issues, and Windows Speech-to-Text also seemed to be more tolerant of our accents than other operating system’s speech-to-text agents. Windows 8 and Windows 10 also allow you to use English (India) if you prefer.
Speech-to-text works great under Windows, and you can also use commands like “Wrap Line” or “Press Control B.” You can use it anywhere there is a text input dialog. Also interesting – as long as the Windows Speech Recognition Toolbar is not closed, you can use the “Start Listening” and “Stop Listening” commands.
Windows 10 has another feature called Dictation. This feature was only newly added in the Windows Fall Creators Update and has just been made available to all users. This may be related to improvements to the Windows virtual keyboard, which now has a microphone button that you can click to start dictation. If you are using a regular computer, you can access dictation and start speaking by pressing Win key + H. However, unlike speech recognition, dictation only works if your language is set to US English, probably because it’s still a new feature.
How to enable voice input on macOS
Voice input using an Apple computer is also very easy. Below are the steps you must follow.
- Go to apple menu > System Preferences > keyboard > dictation
- Click the button to turn on the dictation feature.
- Check Use enhanced dictation – This allows you to use dictation even when offline, which is a useful feature. It requires a 433MB download to activate.
- You can also select a shortcut key from the drop-down menu. We’ll leave it at the default of pressing Fn twice, but you can also enter a custom binding.
This way, whenever you invoke a keyboard command, dictation takes place in the text box, and you can then talk to the computer to type the desired text. As with Windows, you can stop using various commands such as Select Previous Sentence, Go to Beginning, Replace “This” with “That”, and “Stop Dictation.” if you enter System Preferences > Accessibility > dictation and check Enable dictation keyword phrasesor you can start dictation by saying “Computer, start dictation.”
It doesn’t take long to get started, and dictation is generally pretty accurate, but it does seem to be more sensitive to accent-related issues. The word “however” is difficult for Apple to understand. Additionally, dictation on Mac tends to occasionally insert “all” in the middle of sentences, which may also be accent-related.
Note that, especially with computers, you’ll get better results if you use headphones with a microphone instead of relying on your laptop’s built-in microphone.
How to enable voice input on Android
Dictation in Android is a breeze, and you don’t even need to go into any settings – on the phones we were able to check the feature, it appears to be turned on by default. Whenever you enter a text field using the default Google keyboard, you’ll see a microphone icon in the upper right corner of the keyboard. Just click on it and start speaking, and Google will do a good job of transcribing what you say.
Even so, there are a certain number of errors in the text and you have to check manually, but it’s fast and easy to use. You can quickly send a message or reply to an email like this. If you don’t see the voice type option, set this up:
- Go to set up > Language and input > Text-to-speech output
- In the current keyboard, select G board If not selected yet.
- If Gboard is not available, you can download it from Google Play.
Other keyboards also support voice input, but you may use them slightly differently. If you’d like to use a different keyboard, check the provider’s website for more information.
All in all, Google’s voice typing is forgiving of accents and incredibly fast. However, it still makes a lot of mistakes, so you wouldn’t send an unedited document like this. This is a great tool, but keep in mind that it will also miss some words.
How to enable voice input on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
If you’re using an iPhone or iPad, voice typing is just as easy. Open the keyboard, tap Microphone, then tap Enable dictation If you haven’t yet. That’s it, you can go.
We tested it on the first-generation iPad Pro, and the results were excellent. We had speculated that voice dictation would be the same as on the Mac, but the iPad Pro either has a better microphone or uses a slightly different algorithm, as this is actually the best voice typing experience in the entire product.
For the most part, it works very well, although a few words are missed – however, the document keeps updating itself as you add more words, so when you end dictation it tries to re-contextualize the results. When we said “overall” it just showed “all” which is what we had to go back and edit; but when we ended the dictation session it took a few seconds for the keyboard to appear and during that time the text was changed to “overall”!
But this can lead to some strange results – for example, the word “type” becomes “sick”, and with dictation turned off, becomes “say what about”. Artificial intelligence is sometimes a mysterious thing, let’s just leave it at that.
Again, you won’t end up with a perfect document at the end of the meeting, but there’s a lot to be said for being able to rattle off multiple paragraphs and then tweak them to eliminate errors.
So there you have it – these are the built-in tools for voice input on all four major operating systems. Do you use any specialized voice input tools? If so, what was your experience with them? Let us and other readers know in the comments.
