lucstechblog

The great dictator 1 

Ok so as I surf a lot amongst technology websites I now and then stumble on little gems. One of these gems I like to share with you.

If you use Google Chrome as your browser on a PC there is a great add-on called Online dictation. Now what does it do. Well ,exact as the name suggests. It translates spoken word into written word.

As stated before this only works in the Google Chrome browser.

First go the the webpage: dictation.io

Depending on the hardware configuration of your computersystem Chrome will ask you to give permission to use the microphone on your system. I have a very old low-res web-cam with a build in microphone which is immediately recognised.

Next choose your language.

So I chose first Dutch. Just to test how it would function.

Next step is to click the button - Start Dictation - and go ahead. Slowly read out the text you want to convert articulating well and voila:

So next step was to test if my english pronounciation was ok.

So it had some trouble there. First it did not out the s after the word convert as I pronounced carefully - converts-. And second it had a problem with the word -the- as it wrote it down as deep.

Overall I am pleased. More as it is possible to make corrections with your mouse and keyboard on the fly and you can save the written text to your PC (or to the cloud: google drive or dropbox) as a plain ascii text file. Just hit the export button at the bottom of the screen. The text file can be imported in any wordprocessor or office application.

So any real purposes ?? My girlfriend has the memoires from her grandfather. But they were written many years ago on a genuine typewriter. So we are converting it into an electronic text that can be printed and from which I can make a real bound book (hey bookbinding is a hobby of mine, there is a section on the webpages about that). That way we can distribute some real leatherbound books with the memoires of het grandfather amongst family.
But she is a lousy typist. So this helps enormous.

And there is more. Just keep following this web-log.

Till next time have fun

Luc