There are many voice-to-text sites that are now available to us, but one of the nicest and easiest I have found to use is Speechnotes.  This blog post will be simple and quick, like the site, because it’s honestly just an intuitive piece of technology.  What a wonderful and simple tool this is!

Speechnotes is free.  You don’t need an account or a login.  You don’t need to set up student accounts.  You don’t need to download or install anything.  You simply open your Chrome browser, click on the microphone icon, (you may need to “allow access” to microphone if you get a pop-up) and start talking.  Your words appear on the screen in an easy-to-read, distraction-free font.

Along the left side of the screen are a variety of small icons that allow users to do a myriad of things with what they’ve just dictated.  Options include naming, saving, filing, emailing, uploading to Google Drive, or just saving as a .docx file.

On the right side of the screen are simple directions for inserting punctuation.  At the end of a sentence, for example, if you say the word “period”, the program inserts a period.

Just for fun, I switched the language to Puerto Rican Spanish and tried saying some simple sentences in my best Spanish accent.  Aye caramba…this site even puts in the accent marks and tildes where they’re supposed to be!  This makes it equally wonderfully for your ESL students.  The site supports a pretty amazing variety of different languages.

Speechnotes would be great for young students who have not yet learned to type, students who have difficulty with typing, spelling, or writing, students with motor difficulties, ESL students, and a whole bunch of adults who just love the simplicity and shortcuts that voice typing allows…like me!

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Will you use Speechnotes?  How?  You can share here at kerszi.wordpress.com or find me on Twitter @kerszi.  I also have a Facebook page called My Primary Techspiration where you’ll find this and lots of other great tech tips, tools, & tidbits!