How well does Google’s voice transcription work in 2017?
When I was about 10 years old, a family friend purchased Dragon Naturally Speaking. This was more than twenty years ago, so you can imagine how bad it was. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by the possibility of being able to speak to my computer and have it transcribe everything that I said. But I wasn’t about to spend hundreds of dollars on voice recognition software.
In the last few years, Google and Apple have each added voice transcription to their operating systems. Windows has this as well. My curiosity and laziness has finally gotten the best of me, so I figured it is time to see how much I can type with my voice.
So far, this is Google Docs. I am using Google voice transcription in Google Docs and decided to start there because Google Docs and WordPress recently announced an integration. And if I can blog with my voice, keeping my personal blog going while working full time becomes a lot easier.
Let’s see how it goes. And I apologize in advance for the plentiful typos (voiceos?) — they bug me too!
How well does it really work?
well, see for yourself. Starting with this paragraph, I am editing this for substance only, such as cleaning up stutters, and and leaving in all of the capitalize ation and grammatical errors. is illegible? Absolutely period but is it perfect question mark not at all.
Things that I have noticed so far include: one should speak at a reasonable pace. You do not however have to speak like he were talking to an elderly person with hearing issues. other things that help includes saying punctuation such as using the. At the end of a sentence. notice how that was screwed up and this paragraph.
In fact, the biggest issue I see with this is simply formatting and punctuation. You can trigger formatting with verbal cues that I will link to here. Google is pretty good about figuring those out if you say exactly what it wants. It also seems to sometimes pick up on inflection at the end of a question. It does take some practice otherwise to remember to say the punctuation at the end of each then.
does it get better with practice?
Does Google get better with practice? in the long run, yes. Google’s history with voice transcription goes back even before Google Voice transcribed voicemails for free. before that they had their free411 service, where machines had to interact with humans who were asking for free411 information. So yes, we can expect that over the next few years Google voice transcription will get even better as millions of people speak into their smartphones to give Google commands, or use this tool on the desktop.
However, this isn’t like desktop software that trains rapidly as you speak. this does not seem to be getting better as a move for the page. further down the page.
However comma where the real Improvement lies is with me. As I use this more and more, I get more comfortable speaking with punctuation and adjusting my Cadence to allow Google to keep paste. I naturally speak very very fast.
other wild cards Kama especially microphones
Everything you read above, was typed with my voice and a Logitech USB headset. however, Google started to give me warnings about my microphone level being too low. I went into my Windows settings and noticed that I was already at the maximum, so I took the headset off and switch to the microphone that was built into my webcam period
More volume apparently means more accuracy. and that is a huge point colon your success will largely be dictated by your equipment, not just your voice. Those with fancy $200 Mikes will probably have better luck then those we using a built-in microphone on a $50 tablet. With that being said, after I do voice blog posts using Windows, Google, Mac OS X comma and iOS 10 comma I will pick my favorite and if I can hook up external microphones, I will do a sample of a few paragraphs of each.
on a scale of one to throw away my keyboard, where is Google voice transcription?
Insert: we are not quite there yet. I do feel like if I were to use my mouse too select foremost Google suggestions, this would work a lot more smoothly as well. As I type with my voice, any words that Google is not sure about the underline and you can select those words to choose from their suggestions.
However comma the critical factor with voice transcription they will make it ready to replace my keyboard is accuracy. There is no point in Saving Time typing, if I have to spend time edited.
So yes. Google voice transcription is not ready to replace my keyboard. However for a free solution, this is pretty damn fabulous.
Postscript from my keyboard: the new Google Docs to WordPress feature adds lines between paragraphs. Interestingly, so does pasting a document from Microsoft Word, though that has always been the case. I’ll tinker with saying, “New line” instead of “New paragraph” next time to see if that converts to a blog with fewer formatting issues.
