While most of us are probably used to typing things and tasks out on our mobile devices, wouldn’t it be more convenient if you could just talk to your phone and tell it what to do? Voice commands and requests have been gaining traction the past years but there are still some issues when it comes to how the devices and voice assistants respond. Microsoft is bringing new enhanced voice capabilities to its Outlook and Office Mobile apps to make life easier for those who are multitasking for work and for personal reasons.
These voice capabilities rely a lot on artificial intelligence of course so it can contextualize your requests and bring you a rapid response. If you need help or for your device to take an action, hold down the plus sign icon in your Outlook mobile app and then the microphone icon and Cortana (yes it’s alive) together with AI will supposedly do what you need to do. You can ask it to set up meetings and send invites to those you need to join that meeting.
Searching on Outlook should also be easier as you can use natural language to search for files, items, etc. You can say something like “Find emails sent to John with attachments about the Q1 project budget” and it should be able to do just that. You can also use Dictation in Outlook Mobile so you can write emails, respond to messages, etc. Using the speech-to-text feature can save you some time, well, as long as it gets your speech right of course.
Office Mobile also now lets you capture voice recordings and transcribe them into text. Tap the + button at the bottom of the home tab and under quick capture, you’ll have to tap Voice then start speaking to record. Once you’re finished, tap the Done button and your recording will be saved as a voice card. When you play it back, you can use synced text highlighting and also edit the transcribed text.
The enhanced voice capabilities will be available on Outlook Mobile but only in iOS version for now, with Android to follow soon. The voice recording feature on Office Mobile will be rolling out to Android users if you’re running Build 16.0.14026.20096 or later but only if you have English (United States) as your language and country/region.
