People are interacting with technology using voice input more than ever before. Dictation in productivity apps such as Word empower people to conquer the blank page. Dictating is a fast and easy way to get your thoughts on the page during brainstorming, outlining, and authoring content.
Today, Office announced voice commanding on web and mobile as the next step to make dictation more powerful:
Prior to having voice commands, dictation only allowed people to add basic text with speech-to-text and punctuation with phrases like “new line” or “period”. Now, without leaving dictation or having to switch to keyboard and mouse, you can seamlessly use voice commands to accomplish tasks such as correcting text, light formatting, and making lists using natural language. Phrases like “delete that”, “bold last word”, “start list” are now among many new commands and more will be added regularly.
When the Office dictation team was looking for a good way to understand the natural spoken language commands, they reached out to the Azure Language Understanding team. Following that, an exciting new collaboration formed. Language Understanding in Azure Cognitive Services enables the team to build custom natural language models that interpret a users’ natural speech instead of using a strict command language- all without having to be a machine learning expert. With Language Understanding, you can create custom language models with UI-experience with confidence.
This is just one of the many examples of how Microsoft products are powered by cutting edge AI technology in Azure AI. For example, suggested replies in Outlook and PowerPoint Designer each rely on Azure Machine Learning to make recommendations on quick replies and recommended design layouts, respectively. Additionally, Microsoft Teams uses Speech for live captioning of meetings, while Xbox uses Personalizer to make personalized recommendations for Xbox gamers.
Any developer can extend apps with rich AI-powered capabilities irrespective of machine learning expertise. Azure Cognitive Services offers pre-built AI models and simple customization capabilities that help you infuse capabilities of vision, speech, language and decision.
