Free dictation apps that convert your speech accurately to onscreen text do exist. I learned that when I stumbled upon Dictanote in the Chrome Web Store.
Speech recognition technology has become quite impressive in recent times. It has given you assistants like Google Now, Siri, and Cortana to make your routine digital tasks easier.
But dictating notes is one task that's not quite simple even now. While you do have a few voice-to-text apps to choose from, they might not work for you for various reasons.
For example, Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking is excellent, but comes with a hefty price tag. There’s Mac’s built-in dictation tool, but that seems to be a hit-and-miss affair. Then there are other apps in this category that are limited to specific platforms or don't understand a wide variety of accents.
Usually, getting dictation apps to understand my speech is a nightmare, because their error rates for non-American accents seem to be pretty high.
With Dictanote I faced no such problems. Its accuracy was impressive and so was its autocorrect feature, which instantly corrected mistyped words based on context.
It turns out that there are other Chrome-based speech-to-text apps, such as Voice Recognition, that share Dictanote's accuracy levels. That's because they all function on Chrome's Web Speech API, which now boasts a 92% accuracy rate.
Of course, these apps may be accurate, but they’re not flawless. If you use one, do copy-paste your notes to your regular text editor for backup. You could even skip the app installation altogether and use the Web Speech API demo to dictate notes.
By the way, did you know that you can type with your voice in Google Docs?
Do you use a voice-to-text converter? How does it score in terms of accuracy and price? Rate your app of choice in the comments!