Announcing new features for Workspace users, Google said it"s bringing voice typing and captions support to more browsers, such as Edge and Safari, in addition to Google Chrome. The features are rolling out to all Google Workspace users over the coming weeks, including those with personal Google accounts.
You can already use voice typing on Google Docs to edit your documents or edit speaker notes in Google Slides. Meanwhile, you can enable automatic captions to display what the speaker is saying in real time in Google Slides.
"Starting today, we’re expanding support for voice typing and captions features to additional browsers, such as Edge and Safari. When a user turns on voice typing or captions, the web browser controls the speech-to-text service, determines how speech is processed, and then sends text data to Google Docs and Google Slides," Google said in a blog post.
The feature, accessible via Tools > Voice typing, offers a platter of voice commands you can use to edit and format your documents in Google Docs. For example, you can say, "Go to the end of the line," "Select paragraph," and more. You can use different voice commands to start/stop voice typing, select items, format text, copy-paste content, edit tables, add punctuation, and turn on the screen reader, among various use cases.
Voice typing is available in multiple languages, but you can only issue voice commands when the account language and document language are both English. Before using voice commands, you need to make sure the microphone on your Windows PC or Mac is in working condition.
Google said that support for voice typing and automated captions is only available on desktop versions of the web browsers. Admins managing a workspace can disable voice typing and captions altogether and control which web browsers are supported in their organization.
Image via Pexels