Speech to text in new Chrome OS

ComputerWorld carried a post identifying new features that "will" be available in the new Chrome OS. The post seemed to indicate that these new features would be coming soon, but I could not help checking to see if they were already available on my Acer Chrome Tablet. The feature I thought might be most useful in the classroom was the opportunity to use speech to text to dictate to any text field. I found that I had access to this feature and could enter text by speaking to a Google doc.

Speech to text is an accessibility feature and must be activated. You will find the necessary setting by locating the accessibility within settings. You will need to find "Keyboard and text input" and then turn on "Enable dictation".

With speech to text enabled you can both enter text from the keyboard and by using speech to text. When you want to use speech input, you need to toggle the microphone icon which should now appear at the bottom of your Chrome browser window.

Again, this feature may or may not have rolled out to as of this date and may work a little different on other devices.

The article I have linked explains other new features and you will have your own opinions regarding whether the other features will be valuable to you.