♪ (music) ♪
Hi, my name is Laura,
and I'm on the Chrome Accessibility team at Google.
Today, we're going to look at how to use voice
to enter text on your Chromebook.
This can be useful in a number of different situations,
for example, if you have a motor impairment
and want to use your voice instead of physically typing,
or if you simply prefer to speak to enter text.
There are a few different ways to do this on your Chromebook,
so I'll go over each one.
Let's jump in.
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The first way to use your voice to enter text
is to use the built-in accessibility feature called Dictation
available in your Chromebook accessibility settings.
To turn this on, I'll head to Settings,
then type "accessibility" in the search field,
then select Manage accessibility features.
Now that I'm in the full list of accessibility settings,
I'll head to the keyboard and text "input section."
I'll click Enable dictation (speak to type).
Now that this feature is on,
I can use it in two different ways.
First, once I have my cursor in an edit field,
I can click or tap on the microphone icon
that now appears in the lower right section of the screen
near the system menu.
Once I click it, I'll hear a sound effect letting me know that it's listening.
(sound effect)
The icon also visually changes
when it's in listening mode for further confirmation.
I can either click it again to stop
or, after a few seconds, it will timeout and a lower sound effect will play.
(sound effect)
I'll head to Gmail to give this a try.
I have an open email draft,
and I want to send a quick message to my teammates
about having lunch together.
Once my cursor is in the draft,
I'll click on the microphone icon and begin speaking.
(sound effect)
"Anyone want to grab lunch between meetings today, question mark.
If so, let's meet in the lobby at noon."
Now that I have that message typed out,
let's look at another way to use the feature using the keyboard.
I'll head to slides.new
to open up a new Google Slides presentation.
I'll place my cursor in the text field on the slide.
and now I can either click the microphone icon
or I can press the keyboard command Search+d
as in dictation to trigger listening.
Now I'll press Search+d
and speak the slide title "team meeting agenda",
and from there, I can continue to use my voice to enter text.
So those are the two ways to use the built-in dictation feature:
either through using the microphone icon at the bottom of the screen
or through pressing the keyboard command Search+d
to begin speaking.
Now let's take a look at another way to use voice
to enter text on your device.
In the same keyboard and text input section
of your Chromebook accessibility settings,
there's an option to enable the on-screen keyboard.
When this is turned on,
any time you place your cursor into an edit field
the on-screen keyboard appears in the bottom portion of the screen.
This keyboard can be used with a mouse or touchpad,
a connected joystick device,
or touch if you have a touchscreen Chromebook.
If you are regularly using the on-screen keyboard
but also want to use your voice to type,
you can press the microphone button
that appears in the upper right corner of the on-screen keyboard.
I'll head back to Gmail and draft another quick message:
"Hi team I'm going to be a few minutes late
for the meeting later period
please start without me, exclamation point"
And from there I can add the recipients and send the email.
Quick note that if you are using the ChromeVox screen reader
along with dictation,
I'd simply recommend using your headphones.
This way as ChromeVox speaks aloud
you hear it directly in your headphones
and it doesn't interfere with what you were trying to dictate.
So we've gone over how to use the built-in feature for dictation,
as well as using the microphone button
that appears in the on-screen keyboard.
The last thing I wanted to briefly cover today
was how to use voice typing in Google Docs.
To begin I'll navigate to a new Google Doc
by typing docs.new into the URL bar and pressing Enter.
Now I'll click on Tools, then select Voice typing.
Note that I could have also turned voice typing on
by pressing Ctrl+Shift+s.
Now I can click on the large microphone button
that appears in the Google Doc
or press Ctrl+Shift+s to begin typing by voice.
To clarify, I could certainly use the other methods I just showed you
to enter text with voice into this doc.
The Google Docs voice typing also comes with a really rich set of voice editing
and formatting commands to leverage.
I'll click the voice typing button to begin.
"I hope you find this video helpful",
select "I hope you find this video helpful".
Align, center, bold, italicize,
increase the font size, increase font size, select helpful, underline.
Pretty cool, right?
There are over a hundred
different voice editing and formatting commands
in Google Docs voice typing,
so if you're interested I definitely recommend checking them out.
As always, thanks for watching this video
about how to use voice to enter text on your Chromebook.
If you have questions or feedback about accessibility,
find out more at google.com/accessibility.
To sign up for user studies, to explore new features,
and help shape Google products,
go to google.com/usability.
For general feedback or questions on the topics you've seen today,
consider joining our Google group chromebook-accessibility@googlegroups.com
and participate in the conversation with other community members.
Or reach out to our support team
by sending an email to disability-support@google.com.
Also look out for other videos
on ways to make Chrome and Chromebooks easier to use.
Again, I'm Laura,
and on behalf of myself and the Chrome Accessibility team,
thanks for watching.