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Best speech to text app/software


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Search function is not working for me at all. But the title pretty much says it all. I’ve got kids who love making up stories and have aspirations of writing a book, but keep giving up because the physical act of writing a single paragraph is so excruciatingly long... lol. Just looking for some good software here, preferably that won’t break the bank to see if they even like it (they love speech to text when sending DH a text message) but am willing tonight pay more for something better if it turns out to be a big hit.

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What device do you want to run it on? Most tablets, phones, etc. already have dictation software built in. Any intelligibility issues in the dc? If not, then you don't need something that memorizes their speech. Even a kindle fire ($40 on amazon) will do dictation now. The dictation on mac products is pretty good, and the downloaded version (vs. the one done while streaming) is a fuzz better. 

I would start with the free and then decide. If it's not enough, you're looking at Dragon with a mic.

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Some articulation issues, particularly with r, but they’re generally intelligible. I guess this is just a new idea to me, and I didn’t know if there are some that are considered better or how this works really. You dictate and then go back in to edit— Is that best done in a computer then? Sorry for asking such dumb questions! 

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You dictate in words, phrases, or sentences, and it's going to type it out as you pause. So in the pause you can edit, yes, or some people go back and edit at the end. You could run it through Ginger I suppose. Honestly my ds wasn't intelligible to the tech when we tried a couple years ago. Now he probably would be for the most part. He uses Alexa (amazon) and Siri pretty well. 

The dictation on the kindle products is on the device even works even if they're not online. I don't know if that matters to you or not. It also has amazing parental controls, so you can turn off apps, etc. etc. Best Buy will have all kinds of tech in the store, so you might just go try it out. Maybe take earbuds with a mic with you so it can hear you over the crazy noise, lol. Or if you have an old phone, it should be able to do it too. 

You might just start small, like using dictation to compose a text. 

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The speech-to-text feature on Google Docs is pretty good. My 9-10 year old students have used it on a Macbook and Chromebook with good success. I heard from other teachers that an iPad or phone picks up the speech better, but in my experience, just doing it on a laptop was fine. And free! ?

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Also, the Read & Write extension on Chrome is good. It puts a toolbar on top of your browser, and kids can use it in Google Docs and Gmail, I believe. There is also a premium version, not sure how much that costs, but probably not that much. My favorite feature is that it reads back what you write, highlighting the whole sentence as well as highlighting each word as you go along. 

When you are using Chrome, just google "Chrome extensions." On that page, type in "Read & Write" and it will ask you if you want to add the extension. When it's added, there will be a little purple puzzle piece in the top right side of your browser. When you start a new Google Document, click that puzzle piece and a toolbar will appear with options. It's easy to use!

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Kami has been the best for us. It plugs into Google docs on desktop and is all my younger ds uses for his work. You do have to speak punctuation and he has to go back and capitalize by hand, but that might be just him in not figuring out the right code to tell it yet.

I should probably add that we like Kami because it allows speech to text on PDFs as well. I can upload any worksheets I want the boys to complete into Google Classroom, and they can use speech to text to complete them. The conversion features of Kami (Word to PDF within program) and the ability to use speech to text on PDFs, make it worth the fees to me.

Edited by FairProspects
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