Introducing the all-new Voice Dictation v2.0, a speech recognition app that lets you type with your voice. There’s no software to install, there’s no training required and all you need is Google Chrome on your Windows PC, Mac OS or Linux.

Dictation can recognize spoken words in English, Hindi, Español, Italiano, Deutsch, Français, and all the other popular languages. Another unique feature of Dictation is support for voice commands that let you do more with your voice. For instance, you can say a command like new line or nueva línea for inserting lines. You can add punctuations, special symbols and even smileys using simple commands in most languages.

This YouTube video will walk you through the Dictation app.

How to use Dictation for Speech Recognition

Dictation stores everything in your browser locally and not a byte of your data is uploaded anywhere.  Speech recognition will be more accurate in a quiet environment and the built-in microphone of your computer should be good enough.

Open dictation.io in Google Chrome and choose your native language from the drop-down. Then click the microphone icon (or tap the Start button) to activate web speech and start speaking.

The first time you use Dictation, you would need to allow permissions to the website to access your microphone.  Also, make sure that no other browser tab is using Speech Recognition at the same time.

As you speak, your voice is continuously converted into text in real time. There are no limits o and when you are done with dictation, you can click the “Stop” button or say “Go to Sleep” to turn off speech recognition.

Speech to Text with Dictation

Dictation supports speech to text as well so you can listen to the transcribed audio in any of the available voices. You can alter the speed and pitch of the playback with simple controls.

Publish to the Web

Dictation includes a WYSIWYG editor to help you format the transcribed text. You can copy the rich-text to the clipboard with a click and paste into other apps like Gmail or Microsoft Word with the formatting.

You also have the “Publish” button to anonymously publish your note to the Internet and this page can only be accessed by users who know the link.

Convert Recorded Audio to Text

If you have an MP3 file that you would like to transcribe to text, Dictation can help you do that well. Choose the language on dictation.io, click the start button, then play the audio file on your mobile and watch as the words are converted into text in real time. See demo.

Dictation - The Technical Stuff

Dictation uses the HTML5 Web Speech API that is currently implemented only in Google Chrome on the desktop. For Text to Speech, it uses the SpeechSynthesis interface of the Web Speech API that is available in Chrome, Microsoft Edget and Firefox.

The rich-text editor is built with Quill while the voice command interface is made possible with Annyang. Dictation uses the Github API to publish dictated notes online as anonymous gists.