The Dictation App is a simple means to convert voice to text on your Windows 10 Mobile phone. The app uses Cortana's voice recognition engines and cloud-based services for more accurate conversions and lessens the impact on your phone's resources.
The layout of the app is somewhat minimal and the voice to text conversions is fairly accurate. I did run into issues where my Southern accent tripped the app, but not as often as I expected.
The Dictation App has a free trial version with the full version of the app priced at $2.49.
The design of the Dictation App is not very complex with most of the app's features covered in one screen. Control buttons line the bottom of the screen to start your dictation, erase the text and email the dictation. Just below these control buttons is a status bar that alerts you when the app is idle when speech is detected, confidence levels and more.
As you speak, the text field that takes up most of Dictation App's display begins to populate with the written words that are spoken. Even though the developer recommends speaking at a slower rate, I found the app transcribes your spoken words at a decent pace. While you may not be able to talk at an auctioneers' pace, the Dictation app kept pace while speaking in a normal tone and pace.
The Windows 10 Mobile app also interprets words such as coma, period, colon and others as punctuation marks. If you need a line break, saying "new line" generates the new paragraph.
In testing the Dictation App, I read from books, spoke gibberish and made up things to say. I laid on my Southern Accent heavily and even mumbled through my hand. While there were plenty of miscues by the Dictation App, I was pleasantly surprised at the conversion accuracy. I did find that the app struggled between text and numerical forms of numbers. I would say "4" and it would register as "four" or vice versa.
When the Dictation App does misread what you are saying, you can tap the text field and edit the dictation as needed. When all is said and edited, the dictated text can be emailed to yourself or others. There is also the ability to highlight, copy and paste the text to other apps such as Word.
Along with the dictation feature, the app's main page has access to a help screen (the menu button in the upper left corner) and a language selection. The language you want to work with must be supported by Cortana before it appears in the drop-down menu.
I can see the Dictation App coming in handy for times you do not have a pencil and paper or simply not in a position to write something down. Create a Live Tile on your Windows Phone Start Screen for easy access and when those random thoughts hit you while driving, the Dictation App can help document those thoughts.
There is room for improvement with the Dictation App such as the ability to save the document to a .txt file. The accuracy of conversion is good, but there is always room for fine-tuning there as well.
Overall, I found the Dictation App to be a good voice to text Windows 10 Mobile app. There is a free trial version available and the full version of the Dictation App is priced at $2.49. The trial is not ad-support and with no indication in the Store description, I suspect it is time-sensitive.
Download Dictation App for Windows 10 Mobile
