Speaker 1: Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing this fine day? Today on The Big Show, I want to talk to you about dictation, more than just straight-up dictation. We've had dictation for a long time. On our smartphones, on our computer, both Apple and Microsoft gives us system-level dictation which works phenomenally well. If you just want to type into a document, you can do it with your voice using the dictation features that are built into your operating system. But Google has taken that and said, hold my beer, I've got something better called voice typing. It is a step beyond dictation and it might just change your life. That's today on DottoTech. Okay, let's set things up. For the longest time, we've been able to use dictation which is built into the operating system of our computers and our smartphones. In the Apple world, if you go under the keyboard in the system extensions, you can go into dictation and you can turn on dictation, allowing you to be able to speak into the microphone and have that speech translated into text. So for example, if I'm in Evernote and for me, I've got it enabled with just a keyboard shortcut, I hit the keyboard shortcut and I can start dictating, comma. It will accept punctuation. It will allow me to write with my voice which is very awesome except for one fact, if I need to edit anything. As soon as I click my mouse inside of dictation and try and make any changes, I lose control. Well, I don't lose control but the dictation stops and I have to start over again. This is good but there is better. Allow me to show you better. If we go into Google Docs, under the tools menu is voice typing. It's just kind of sitting there like nothing special but it is indeed something special. Let me show you how voice typing works. Voice typing allows us to do this. We turn it on and a little dialog box appears, a switch really, that allows us to turn it on. It will use our computer's microphone. Let me put an insertion point in the document so that we can start before I turn on the voice typing. I'm going to put a couple of returns so that we can see exactly what it is I'm doing. Now into this blank space here, I'm going to start typing with my voice. You've just seen me do that using the system level tool so this isn't too amazing. But it's what I do as I type that I want you to pay attention to. I am going to edit the document on the fly as you would if you were normally typing. Not just dictating and then having to stop and start over again but continuing to type as with my voice by making changes, highlighting text, adding carriage returns, et cetera. So watch. I've now turned on the voice dictation and as you expect, it is accurately recording what I'm saying and converting that into text. Now the big difference between what I'm doing right now, comma, and what was being done with straight dictation is if I click my mouse now, comma, it will not stop the system from listening but instead it will allow me to interactively work with my keyboard and mouse and my voice all at the same time, period, new paragraph. This is straight up amazing. Bold. I can insert and start typing again. I can add to the text. I can do basic formatting. I can change words. Mouse. So this allows me to interactively work with the document, period. New line. For me, this is a game changer, period, new paragraph. Let me show you some of the commands that are available to you. Now before I talk to you about the different commands that are built in, I should tell you that this works on so many languages and so many accents. Here is a list of the different languages that is supported under voice typing and the dialects or the accents that are incorporated in those different languages. So pretty much as far as I can tell, a vast majority of the world's languages is supported by this technology which again, I'm just gobstopped that Google isn't telling this to the entire world and telling us what a great tool this is because this is pretty darn amazing, don't you agree? Now you choose your language here under this dialog box here inside of when you open the tool. You can access the language of choice. You have to choose the language that you're going to be working with. I can't really tell a difference between United States English and UK English. Maybe it's because I have a very neutral accent. I thought it might be it does different spelling but the spelling is set basically in your keyboard settings, not here in this dialog box. So for English, either one is probably going to work quite well. Now what commands do we have available? I've shown you basic punctuation so you know that we can do commas, paragraphs. You can end a sentence with proper punctuation such as a question mark, period, or an exclamation mark, period. You will notice it automatically capitalizes the beginning of new sentences, period, new line. And we can start new sentences on new lines or in an entirely different paragraph, period, new paragraph. And you see the formatting carries through. Now you can also select text and you can apply basic formatting to that text. So let's start it up again and watch. Select formatting, bold, undo, new line. You can adjust font size or color. Select line, text color red, make it bigger. I think you get the idea that we can do so much basic formatting but the concept of this interactive nature of staying on your keyboard and mouse, being able to select text, make changes verbally, and just kind of work interactively with our other input devices, to me as I say, I believe it's a real game changer. I'm going to share a document with you which will teach you all of the different commands because you have to be specific in the wording of the commands as you use the formatting commands to increase in font sizes, to do paragraph formatting, alignment, adjust columns, to create lists. All of that is built into the voice typing but you do have to learn the nomenclature and it's very simple. There will be a link in the description below. So I'm wondering, what do you think? Am I on point with thinking this is a real game changer? I have started to write using this technique and I have to say that I feel I am far more productive, far more creative, and a little less lazy. Sometimes I would write a sentence and I wouldn't be entirely happy with it and it seems like a lot of work to go back and edit it on the keyboard whereas by voice, maybe it's just me, but I am finding it a pleasure to be writing using voice typing. For the longest time, I thought voice typing and dictation were the same thing but I think that we've seen here right now that they are very different and this is available to us free as a part of Google Docs. So try it out. Let me know in the comments what you think. Does this have the potential to change the way that you write? Is it a huge benefit to you or maybe it gets in the way? Maybe you prefer being on the keyboard. I would love to hear your thoughts in comments below. Now if you found this video to be useful and helpful and inspire you in any way, well then a like and a share would be greatly appreciated as of course with a subscribe. Now before we leave, I have one last thing that I want to let you know about and that is every week here at DottoTech, we host a weekly tutorial webinar called Webinar Wednesday. It's free. It's on some aspect of productivity or content creation and I am hereby officially inviting you to join us for an upcoming Webinar Wednesday. I hope to see you there. Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.