No more spending money on Dragonspeak and other dictation software anymore. Microsoft announced they’re own long overdue dictation app called Dictate. Dictate is an add-in providing dictation features for Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint. Microsoft is making Dictate available as a free download for 32-bit and 64-bit Office.

The application is not native to Office nor is it being released by the Microsoft Office team but by the Microsoft Garage project. Dictate is being put out as a Microsoft Garage app and not by the Office Team because Microsoft will watch the adoption rate of the app to see if it’s worth spending time developing into Office natively.

Dictate works with Office 2013 or later, and requires Windows 8.1 or newer so if you are still running Office 2000, XP, 2007 or 2010 sorry you are out of luck. The plug-in supports over 20 languages for dictation and can translate 60 languages in real time.