Microsoft is using Cortana's voice recognition skills to bring dictation to the company's Office suite. The new application is simply called Dictate, and is the latest Microsoft Garage project, which is the company's experimental software team. Dictate is more a plugin for the application, since you really need Office to even use it. But once you install it, you can speak loudly in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint and have your words automatically transcribed into the selected text field.
20 languages are voice-to-text compatible, and Dictate also supports "real-time text translation" for up to 60 languages. Dictate started as a hackathon project, according to Microsoft's blog. In addition to blabbing out emails or a word document, you can also speak out the commands ("next line") and punctuation when using Dictate. But with this is just a Garage application, Nuance and other companies that specialize in voice dictation software do not have much reason to be wary yet.
Dictation uses the "state of the art" speech recognition and artificial intelligence behind Cortana, the Bing Speech API, and Microsoft Translator, according to the company.
