The Galaxy Chromebook Plus dictation button is cool, but the feature needs work

Of all the superlatives available on the new Galaxy Chromebook Plus from Samsung, the new dictation key is one of the quieter first-ever features we’ve seen. I’m not even sure it was mentioned in much of the announcement materials, but we knew it would be here before it was announced, and I’m happy to see it working the way you’d expect it to.

Without having to first enable dictation in the Accessibility menu, you can simply hit the new key, agree to the feature being turned on, and off you go. As long as your cursor is in a text area, the built-in ChromeOS dictation feature will allow you to speak text quickly and without too much fuss. But it’s far from the best voice-to-text model Google is capable of.

Gboard does it better

Take Gboard on Pixel devices for example. The dictation option that is always present on Google’s own keyboard is far better at picking up things that are said, is far more accurate, and much better at choosing when to add caps to certain words and when to add punctuation, too.

The dictation on ChromeOS has some cool tricks where you can say things like paste, select all, undo, new line, delete previous word and lots more, so I don’t want to dunk on it as if it isn’t pretty powerful. All those things are fantastic for entering bulk text if you can’t (or don’t want to) type on the keyboard.

But the quality of the actual voice-to-text, random punctuation, and random capitalization of worlds in a given sentence is not just frustrating: it’s counter productive, too. I’ve tried dictating articles and the wrong words, random caps, and random periods make the process of cleanup not worth the initial effort. I’d be faster by just typing it all out correctly the first time.

And I suspect there’s something Google can do about this. I’d suggest they leave in all the cool vocal shortcuts, but give us the language models that get used for Gemini and Gboard instead. If the models could catch my voice accurately and I could more-easily speak in my punctuation, I’d genuinely consider dictating more stuff on my Chromebook. As it stands for now, however, I’ll be sticking to the good ol’ keyboard.