New Dictate feature in French: finds an English sound equivalent instead of French words -Updated

New Dictate feature in French: finds an English sound equivalent instead of French words -Updated
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 May 11 2018
5 Comments (5 New)
Completed

--UPDATE-- I just tried the feature again and found (or finally noticed...) the small drop-down arrow giving access to other languages. SO this means that probably most users will stumble on the same issue because even with French UI/keyboard, it defaults to English US. Word recognition with French (France) gave better results! But it still does not recognize the punctuation mark words.

 

My original post (below) did mention hilarious results that are obviously not as bad as I thought. So technically, it "works" but not as seamlessly as in English. I would then have this comment: if you can let us know how long users can expect before it gets improved in other languages, that would be helpful to answer their questions.

Thanks!

 

Original post: 

I did a quick test drive of the new Dictate feature yesterday and let's just say results were...hilarious?1?

 

I'm on V.1805 Build 9330.2014 Monthly Channel.

- In PowerPoint, "Titre de la présentation" (title of presentation in English), ended up in "Sit her down, please."  LOL

- In Outlook, "Bonjour à toi - virgule" (Hello you, and the word for coma as punctuation mark), ended up in "Borschel at work with girl." ROFL

 

I tested with French keyboard, English UI. French keyboard and French UI: no luck.

But the few tests done in English were good.

 

Even though I am reporting this as an issue, I realise this is brand new and probably will get fine tuned. What can we tell users in terms of time required to make this feature work in another language!

 

Comments
Microsoft

Hi @Chantal Bossé thanks for updating the post below with the new information and for your feedback. So I think you have a few bits of feedback to give...

1) The dictate should pick up the office users language from their current configuration without having to change it in the dictate dropdown.

2) It seems that currently it does not recognize the punctuation mark words in French.

3) When will the feature improve for French and other languages?

If you can confirm I have them right I will share with the team responsible for the feature and also find out where best to give feedback like this going forward.

Thanks

Staff

 

@Stafford Quaid Yes, that's exact. Thank you for forwarding to the team responsible for the feature.

Chantal

Copper Contributor

Hi Chantal, I'm a program manager at Microsoft working on the Dictate feature. Thank you for trying it out.

 

Regarding the punctuation issue, we are working on addressing that. It turns out it only affected some locales. 

 

Regarding the language choice, can you tell me what you had set for your Editing Language in your configuration when you were testing this out? (e.g. File > Options > Language)

 

Regards, 

Derik 

Hi Derik,

 

When I first tested, my Editing Language was set to French. But I just tested it again and there is already a lot of nice changes to it (v. 1805 build 9330.2053, monthly channel targeted):

- Some punctuation recognized

- More languages in the drop-down list of Dictate button

- Language selected according to Editing Language

 

When playing with changing my UI language, I just realized that users doing the same thing will also need to be reminded that the default editing language needs to be changed at the same time, so Dictate sets the right language. 

 

Seems like you guys are working so fast now that you make our testing/comments obsolete in no time! LOL Great improvements. :)

 

The support article in French is machine-translated for now, so if you ever need help with that do let me know. I would just need the official French punctuation list so review & adapt the article.

 

Regards,

Chantal

 

Microsoft
Status changed to: Completed