The latest version of Google Docs introduces dictation, or “Voice typing”, as its makers call it in a blog post announcing the feature.
It’s pretty much what it sounds like. Users who turn on the feature will be able to dictate the content of their documents, with Google’s speech recognition deciphering their language and producing it in text. And what’s more, voice command also enables users to edit and format their documents by barking orders like “underline”, “copy”, and so on.
It’s a product of Google’s considerable investment in speech recognition R&D, which produced a kind of breakthrough last September, and was supplemented with the purchase of a speech recognition startup the next month. It also may reflect a broader trend that has seen developers start to shift focus away from traditional user interfaces and to more innovative modalities such as voice command; this certainly appears to be the case with Sony’s newly announced Xperia devices.
It’s a shift that some analysts have predicted with the emergence of the Internet of Things; but in the case of Google Docs, it also happens to be a neat new feature that should make the app a little easier to use.
Source: Google Docs Blog
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February 26, 2016 -by Alex Perala
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