Not only has Microsoft just added 25 more languages to the Dictation feature of Microsoft Office 365, they’ve also promoted six languages from ‘Preview’ to full dictation status.
Microsoft has been unusually quiet about all the improvements in Dictation, focusing on the new languages while not even mentioning that six languages which were labelled ‘Preview’ have now been promoted to full dictation status.
Dictation and Read Aloud in Office is our complete guide to the speech features in Microsoft Office for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android. It’s been UPDATED to include details on all the new and promoted languages.
All 25 new dictation languages
Here’s the full list of additional languages with their Language-Locale codes
- Arabic (Bahrain), ar-BH
- Arabic (Egypt), ar-EG
- Arabic (Saudi Arabia), ar-SA
- Bulgarian, bg-BG
- Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong), zh-HK
- Croatian, hr-HR
- Czech, cs-CZ
- English (New Zealand), en-NZ
- Estonian, et-EE
- Greek, el-GR
- Gujarati (India), gu-IN
- Hebrew, he-IL
- Hungarian, hu-HU
- Irish, ga-IE
- Latvian, lv-LV
- Lithuanian, lt-LT
- Maltese, mt-MT
- Marathi (India), mr-IN
- Romanian, ro-RO
- Slovak, sk-SK
- Slovenian, sl-SI
- Tamil (India), ta –IN
- Telugu (India), te- IN
- Turkish, tr-TR
- Vietnamese, vi-VN
All these languages are in Preview status and appear under the fully supported language list.
Choose a Dictation language from the Settings | Spoken Language list.
Dictation and Read Aloud in Office is our complete guide to the speech features in Microsoft Office for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android.
Six languages now ‘Full’, upgraded from ‘Preview’
All these languages were preview but are now fully supported:
- English (Australia)
- English (India)
- French (Canada)
- Hindi
- Japanese
- Portuguese (Brazil)
That’s in addition to the existing fully supported languages:
- Chinese (China)
- English (Canada)
- English (United Kingdom)
- English (United States)
- French (France)
- German (Germany)
- Italian (Italy)
- Spanish (Mexico)
- Spanish (Spain)
Preview vs fully supported Dictation languages
The Preview languages are a ‘work in progress’ by the smart multi-lingual people at Microsoft.
For preview languages, Dictation may not always recognize speech properly and punctuation support might be limited.
Don’t be put off trying a preview language, despite the label, Dictation should work quite well.
Who gets it?
The new and promoted Dictation languages are available to Microsoft Office 365 Insiders:
- Windows v 2012 build 13616.10000 and later
- Mac v16.32 build 19120802 and later
They are also being rolled out to Office on the web (in a browser).
Like many new Office cloud-based features, the rollout is gradual and may not appear for everyone at first.
New look Dictation coming to Word for Windows
Dictation updates in Office 365 for Mac
Word Online gets Dictation – type with your voice
