Google Docs becomes a better listener with more accurate voice typing tools in its latest update

Have you ever heard of Dragon, Naturally Speaking? It is, or at least was, one of the most popular voice-to-text software on the market that allowed you to type and control your PC with just your words. Years ago, Google added something similar to Docs, and called it, well, “Voice typing”. Like Dragon, Docs could also take commands for punctuation, deleting words and sentences, making corrections, jumping to the next line, and so on.

The beauty of voice typing is that it’s so much more than just voice-to-text conversion – it’s intelligent action-based productivity that keeps you from having to touch the keyboard almost at all. In a Workspace Updates blog post today, the company revealed that it’s enhancing these voice typing capabilities further by making them more accurate!

These improvements are meant to reduce errors and keep audio from dropping during transcription. Additionally, most major browsers will now be able to run Voice typing. Also mentioned is that anyone using Slides will now see automatically generated punctuation for caption sentences.

Google hopes to make Docs and Slides more accessible and inclusive for all of its users, and I have to admit that fixes to voice tools are a primary way to achieve that goal. Everyone will benefit from this update across personal Google accounts, all Workspace tiers, and even legacy G Suite Basic and Business licenses. The rollout period has already begun, but if you have a Scheduled Release domain, you may have to wait until as late as mid to late February to see it appear.