What is dictation?

The three meanings

1. Speaking for someone to write down. A manager dictates a letter, and an assistant writes it in shorthand or types it.
2. Voice typing on a device. You talk and software turns your speech into text as you go. This is what most people mean today.
3. A classroom exercise. A teacher reads a passage aloud and students write it down, to practise spelling, listening and punctuation.

A short history

• Scribes and secretaries. For centuries, people who could afford it dictated letters, books and records to trained writers. Shorthand systems such as Pitman (1837) and Gregg (1888) let secretaries write as fast as people speak.
• Recording machines. From the early 1900s, dictation machines recorded speech on wax cylinders and later on tape, so a typist could transcribe it later. "Dictaphone" was a brand that became a general word.
• Speech recognition. Consumer dictation software arrived in the 1990s and needed hours of training to learn your voice. Today it's built into every phone and computer, works out of the box and runs partly on the device itself.

How speech-to-text works today

The software listens to your audio, breaks it into short slices, and uses a trained model to predict the most likely words, using the surrounding words as context. Newer systems also add punctuation and fix grammar automatically. Some run entirely on your device. Others send audio to a server, which is why many dictation tools need an internet connection.

Why people dictate

• Speed. Most people speak several times faster than they type.
• Comfort and access. It helps with repetitive strain injury, dyslexia, limited mobility and vision loss.
• Getting ideas out. Talking through a first draft is often easier than staring at a blank page.

Try it now with the free online dictation tool, or use the dictation built into your device.