Office Watch has written extensively about the pros and cons of Dictate, as well as providing a step by step tutorial. Like other dictation tools, you can use voice commands, like “full stop”, “new paragraph”, or “delete last 5 words”. It keeps up well if you talk fast but may lag a bit. The processing of speech to text is done in the Microsoft cloud. Then click on the Dictate button in the Ribbon and start talking. You will need a microphone, either a headset, earbuds or use the built-in microphone in your device. The button is in the Home tab in the Voice group in the Ribbon. Dictate lets you talk to your computer and converts your words to text. It can be found in the software versions and the browser versions of the apps. Read on to learn more! Dictateĭictate is a feature in Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint. MS Word also has a read aloud feature, which is helpful for editing your own work. If you are used to recording your notes or capturing audio from a meeting and asking your support staff to transcribe it, now you can upload the audio file and MS Word will transcribe the text. Native tools in the Microsoft 365 office suite let you dictate a document or email. Microsoft 365 has a lot of options for interacting with the spoken word.