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Educational Support Resources

Tools and resources to assist students, faculty, and staff experiencing learning differences and/or, challenges including online learning support

Speech to Text in Google Docs

Speech-to-text/dictation tools

How to do voice typing on a Google doc

  1. Start a new Google doc.
  2. Click on tools.
  3. Click voice typing. The first time you use voice typing, you must give access to your computer microphone.
  4. You will see a picture of your microphone. When you’re able to access the microphone, it will turn from grey to red.
  5. When you see the red microphone with 2 circles, this indicates that Google is listening and ready to begin dictation
  6. Proceed to speak and remember to add in punctuation.
  7. When complete, please feel free to make any edits.

Immersive Reader

There are many assistive technology tools out there. These include tools that can be especially helpful to students who have been diagnosed with a language-based learning disability. One is the Microsoft Immersive Reader. The Immersive Reader takes selected text and moves the text into its own screen (which helps to reduce distractions when reading) and then reads the text aloud. It’s a text-to-speech technology. To get started, you can install the Immersive Reader as a Chrome Extension or use the Edge browser or use One Note. Once installed, you can highlight the text you would like to be read aloud by clicking “help me read this.” You can choose a male or female voice, speed up or slow down the pace, increase the spacing of the text, change the font, highlight parts of speech, and click on a visual dictionary to define words.

Here are some links on how to use Immersive Reader on the Web, MacOs, Windows 10, One Note and the iPad.

Note: The Immersive Reader does not work in Google Docs. However, there is a workaround you can use if you choose to publish a Google Doc to the web. The published link turns the Doc into a webpage. At that point, the Immersive Reader will work. The link below explains steps to do this.

Please note that if you find it difficult to use the Immersive Reader with a PDF, you can copy and paste the text into One Note to more easily use the Immersive Reader.