Microsoft Office's coolest feature is getting a major upgrade

Microsoft Dictate
(Image credit: Microsoft)

More Microsoft Office users will now be able to use the software's speech to text feature as the company has announced that it has expanded the number of supported languages in Microsoft Dictate.

According to a new video from the software giant, Microsoft Dictate now supports Chinese (Taiwanese), Hindi, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian and Thai in addition to Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish.

While web and mobile Office users can access this feature for free, doing so on Windows and Mac requires a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Microsoft Dictate

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Getting started with Microsoft Dictate

In order to test out Microsoft Dictate for yourself, you'll first need to sign in to your Microsoft account using Edge, Firefox or Chrome. 

From here go to Home, select Dictate and first-time users will be prompted to enable microphone permissions on their smartphone or computer. A microphone icon will then appear and you'll need to wait for it to turn on to be sure it has started listening. It's worth noting that Windows 10 users can use the keyboard shortcut Alt + ' to toggle their mic on and off.

Office users can insert punctuation at any time by saying them explicitly such as “full stop” for a period and they can also go down a line by saying “new line”. You can find even more commands for Microsoft Dictate by checking out this support document.

If you haven't tried out dictation in a while, you're in for a surprise as speech to text technology has advanced a great deal in recent years and is now much more accurate.

Via MSPoweruser

Anthony Spadafora

After working with the TechRadar Pro team for the last several years, Anthony is now the security and networking editor at Tom’s Guide where he covers everything from data breaches and ransomware gangs to the best way to cover your whole home or business with Wi-Fi. When not writing, you can find him tinkering with PCs and game consoles, managing cables and upgrading his smart home.