25 new languages added to Microsoft Office Dictation
OFFICE WATCH Our 27th year of watching Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint ... 4 May 2022 - Vol. 27 No. 18
25 new languages added to Microsoft Office Dictation
29 APRIL 2022
Not only has Microsoft just added 25 more languages to the Dictation feature of Microsoft Office 365, they’ve also promoted six languages from ‘Preview’ to full dictation status.
Microsoft has been unusually quiet about all the improvements in Dictation, focusing on the new languages while not even mentioning that six languages which were labelled ‘Preview’ have now been promoted to full dictation status.
All 25 new dictation languages
Here’s the full list of additional languages with their Language-Locale codes
Arabic (Bahrain), ar-BH
Arabic (Egypt), ar-EG
Arabic (Saudi Arabia), ar-SA
Bulgarian, bg-BG
Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong), zh-HK
Croatian, hr-HR
Czech, cs-CZ
English (New Zealand), en-NZ
Estonian, et-EE
Greek, el-GR
Gujarati (India), gu-IN
Hebrew, he-IL
Hungarian, hu-HU
Irish, ga-IE
Latvian, lv-LV
Lithuanian, lt-LT
Maltese, mt-MT
Marathi (India), mr-IN
Romanian, ro-RO
Slovak, sk-SK
Slovenian, sl-SI
Tamil (India), ta –IN
Telugu (India), te- IN
Turkish, tr-TR
Vietnamese, vi-VN
All these languages are in Preview status and appear under the fully supported language list.
Choose a Dictation language from the Settings | Spoken Language list.
Six languages now ‘Full’, upgraded from ‘Preview’
All these languages were preview but are now fully supported:
English (Australia)
English (India)
French (Canada)
Hindi
Japanese
Portuguese (Brazil)
That’s in addition to the existing fully supported languages:
Chinese (China)
English (Canada)
English (United Kingdom)
English (United States)
French (France)
German (Germany)
Italian (Italy)
Spanish (Mexico)
Spanish (Spain)
Preview vs fully supported Dictation languages
The Preview languages are a ‘work in progress’ by the smart multi-lingual people at Microsoft.
For preview languages, Dictation may not always recognize speech properly and punctuation support might be limited.
Don’t be put off trying a preview language, despite the label, Dictation should work quite well.
Who gets it?
The new and promoted Dictation languages are available to Microsoft Office 365 Insiders:
Windows v 2012 build 13616.10000 and later
Mac v16.32 build 19120802 and later
They are also being rolled out to Office on the web (in a browser).
Like many new Office cloud-based features, the rollout is gradual and may not appear for everyone at first.
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