How can I transcribe my dictated stories?

QI would like to dictate short stories to my computer for subsequent editing in Microsoft Word or other compatible software. Can you recommend a program to do this please? Dave Sharpe

ATranscription software used to be specialist and expensive, but the arrival of voice-recognition technology on all our PCS has changed all that. Long-established favourites such as Dragon Naturallyspeaking are still around, and it remains peerlessly accurate and powerful, but it’s not cheap (£79.99, www.nuance.co.uk/ dragon). That’s expensive considering you can now use websites such as Dictation ( https://dictation.io) to transcribe your words for downloading as plain text, completely free. All you need is a PC with a microphone.

There are many happy-medium tools that can take your dictation without costing money or needing to be online. Our favourite is the portable, open-source program Wryte ( www.snipca.com/25902). Just click Start, then talk, then click Stop, and then click Edit to make any changes before copying and pasting into Word. To get Wryte, click the top ZIP link, download the file, extract its contents, then click ‘wryte.exe’ to run the program.

To avoid this slightly long-winded download process, you could instead try Microsoft Dictate ( http://dictate.ms), a new Office add-in created by the experimental Microsoft Garage project. It can translate between languages as well as transcribe your dictation directly into Word, and it obeys commands such as “new line” and “question mark”. It only works with Microsoft Office (not Libreoffice or Google Docs) and requires Windows 8.1 or 10.