Google Docs Now Lets You Be More Productive With Just Your Voice

In bringing voice commands to Docs, Google has essentially made a paid software utility free of charge for everyone.

This is a quick and easy way to get work done on Google Docs on the web. Note that this feature is available in the Chrome browser. “Starting today, you can also edit and format your documents with your voice”, Google product manager Isaiah Greene wrote in a blog post.

You can access Google’s improved voice typing engine by going to the tools menu.

Besides being able to transcribe voice into text, this new feature is also able to recognize commands such as “copy”, “go to the end of the line”, “highlight word” and can even insert punctuations.

There are commands for basic editing and formatting as well as for adding tables, adjusting text and moving anything around a document.

Google competes with several other players in the productivity application market, notable Microsoft, and a powerful voice typing feature in Docs could help Google to attract new users. You can apply text formatting options such as bold or italics, change the alignment on the page or change the text color.

Google today announced updates to Google Docs that builds on the speech recognition capabilities it introduced a few months ago.

Google has a full list of voice commands here. And watch this YouTube clip from Google Docs to see voice commands in action.