Office 2010 RTM Speech Evolution

Office 2010, along with Windows 7, is an illustrative example of Microsoft’s commitment to embracing Natural User Interfaces (NUI) with its products. Multi-touch, gesture- and object-recognition support are just an aspect of NUI, with speech being at least equally as important, albeit receiving less focus for the time being. The evolution of speech technology in the next generation of the Office System means that customers will be able to leverage the Speak feature even in the context of translations.

“In Office 2010, one of our new features is an on-the-fly translation feature called Mini Translator. The Mini Translator allows you to translate single words or many paragraphs simply by hovering over the text that you want to translate. Mini Translator also includes the ability to Speak that text using Microsoft’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine,” Kate Kelly, program manager in the Office Global Experience Platform (GXP), revealed.

And just as it was the case with Windows 7, Microsoft has responded to customer feedback by integrating changes into Office 2010, in accordance with their requests. The RTM version of Office 2010 will allow users to add more languages than ever before to components of the productivity suite.

“We teamed up with the Microsoft Speech Technologies team to make this possible. With the RTM version of Office 2010, expected sometime in June, you will be able to download and use the Speech Platform and additional TTS engines from the Microsoft Download Center,” Kelly stated.

Via the Speak feature, Office 2010 customers are able to take advantage of text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities in OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word. In this regard, as more TTS engines are added to the productivity suite, more languages become available.

“We have also enabled Speak for the Quick Access Toolbar and the Customize Ribbon Options. Customers who rely on TTS can add the Speak button to either of these and have quick access to Speak at any time (via the mouse or a keyboard shortcut),” Kelly added. “Speak will recognize the language of the text you select and checks if you have that Text-to-Speech language, either from a built-in Windows TTS engine, 3rd party engine, or a TTS engine from the Download Center.”