Speech recognition technology is being implemented in many ways. Before the year 2006, it was used only in robots. Now, you’ll find speech recognition systems in cars, airplanes, etc. SR engines in vehicles are complex and sophisticated. Traveling by plane and buying a vehicle is not possible for everyone. But most people on the planet do own a smartphone. Because of the tremendous efforts of Google to keep Android OS the best mobile phone operating system in the world, it is now possible to do things that were impossible when Nokia was the leading mobile phone brand.
Nokia phones had a narrator tool that converted text to speech. Android allows you to do the reverse of this i.e use your voice as input. Android OS features an inbuilt utility for the same. Modern phones running on Android have a speech recognition function built-in. They can use this feature to search on Google, make phone calls, send text messages, emails, etc easily.
Which is the best voice to text app for Android?
Many people don’t know that Google Keyboard comes with a speech-to-text converter tool, and they waste their time searching for the best voice-to-text app. Google keyboard comes preinstalled on every Android phone, and it’s pretty good at recognizing the words you speak. If your phone doesn’t have this application, open the Play Store on your mobile device and install it.
Apart from its intuitive and smart keyboard functionality, the app converts voice to text. To use this feature, enable cell phone data connection and tap on the microphone icon, which appears on the top right corner of the keyboard.
The app will now request you to speak. Once you begin talking, the Google Keyboard will start updating the draft message with the words you’ve uttered. If the app has entered an incorrect term, you can easily replace it with another word.
Google Keyboard offers useful customization options. It supports offline speech recognition. To enable the offline mode, you’ll have to download the language files. Google Keyboard can block or enable the usage of offensive words. It allows you to select a default voice input language. If you have connected a Bluetooth headset to your phone, you can still use the voice-to-text feature of the Google keyboard by enabling the headset option from the app’s settings panel.
If you’re searching for a standalone app that converts speech to text on Android, go through our below list:
Live Transcribe
The Google Research Team has developed the Live Transcribe tool. The application requires microphone access permission, and it translates your speech into text. It detects the sounds nearby you and filters them. For example, if a strong wind is blowing near you, Live Transcribe will remove the wind’s sound. LT displays the text on the screen as you speak, and it provides an option to change the text size. By default, LT won’t save transcriptions on your device. You can configure this application to save transcriptions for up to three days. LT also supports several languages. It is one of the best voice-to-text apps for Android smartphones and tablets.
Say Hi
Say Hi is similar to Google Live Transcribe. It translates the words you speak in your local language into text and displays their meaning. Because of this feature, Say Hi is one of the must-have apps for travelers. SH can translate the text you copy to the clipboard. By default, SH converts the speech into the text until you stop talking. You can disable this feature from Say Hi’s settings interface. Say Hi enables users to select their gender and talking speed. You’ll not be able to use it unless you activate the “record voice” permission. This Android voice-to-text app is ad-free, and you’ll have to keep the internet connection on the phone active to use some of its important functions.
ListNote
The first thing that you see after running ListNote is a popup that asks you to enable the light or dark theme UI. Once you select a theme, you can begin using the inbuilt voice-to-text converter tool of ListNote. To do so, tap on the speech recognition button and start speaking. ListNote has the option to pause and reset the speech recognition engine. The words the app recognizes will appear in the text area below these two options. Once all the words you’ve spoken have been converted to text, ListNote will save the contents of the text area in the form of a note. You can edit, lock, or even share this note with your phone contacts and with your friends on social networking apps.
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SpeechNotes
SN is an excellent alternative to the above applications. It allows you to create notes without typing a word. To use SN, you must install the Google app. This is the only drawback of SpeechNotes. SN provides an option to export the notes to the MicroSD card. It allows you to send notes to other users via email, Bluetooth, etc. SN has ads, and it supports voice commands. It can automatically capitalize the first letter of the 1st word of a new sentence. SN has a built-in punctuation keyboard. To insert punctuation, you can tap on the keyboard key or say the name of the punctuation you want to insert in the note.
Voice Writer
Voice Writer is not as famous as ListNote, nor does it have a perfect UI, but Voice Writer does the job very well. The application uses the Google speech recognition API. Thus, the translation from voice to text will be accurate. Apart from English (US, UK, AU) languages, Voice Writer supports various Asian languages, including Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin, and Hindi. It also supports European languages like Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese, etc.
VW also features a translation tool to convert text from one language to another. It has the option to send the output of speech to text converter to your Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Hangouts contact, or to the user of any other messaging app on your phone.
I hope you’ve found the answer to the question which is the best speech to text app for Android in this article.
I am hearing impaired and require an app to convert voice to text on my Android phone. Which is the simplest app recommended?
Hello Allen,
The Google voice to text converter built in the Android OS does a good job of recognizing words we speak. It doesn’t have unwanted options nor does it require any type of configuration. Try it out!
Other apps use Google’s speech recognition API.
Hello, are there any new Voice to text converter that shows the most accurate words and ongoing without any pauses? I am hearing impaired as well.
Please suggest a Marathi OCR App for Android
For some reason there is no microphone showing on my nexus 5x, under settings/speech there is no option for voice to text. How do I obtain that option?
Hi! Is there any android app which can convert pre-recorded audio call in a mobile device to text?
Please suggest
I’m confused with all these apps. I would dearly like to find an app for my cell phone that was take the speech spoken by others and transcribe that into text, so I could have a live conversation with others. Yes, I’m severely hearing impaired, and it seems like there has to be something out there that would do this. Anyone know?
I recognise the benefit of STT to save typing text messages but my key interest is an app which will translate incoming phone calls to text for me to read.
I’m profoundly deaf but could communicate well if such an app exists.
Any thoughts please.
Skype can actually do that
Some of us don’t fully trust google and would love to use a plugin for our keyboard that doesn’t send our voice to google.
in my settings I have an option for bing as voice but its greyed out. odd
I agree! Yesterday I got a message that all my voice message transcriptions would be sent to google. Then the UI changed. It did not provide any other option. That is why I am looking for something else. I don’t see anything that seems to work like the built in app but without using google’s api. I guess I will have to go back to typing everything.
Hello,
I want to know if there’s a free speech to text app with automatic punctuation for android? My husband can’t type and has difficulty with punctuation. He uses speech to text on his phone to send messages to his phone contacts, and people on Facebook messenger.
My son is dyslexic and in secondary school – we need a tablet he can speak into and have his out put in text. He also needs to be able to transfer that text to other places e.g. word at least or a presentation page or the school on line space called Glow and e-mail. Can you suggest the best tablet and app for this please
My friend is disabled and cannot use his hands. He can manage to swipe to turn on his phone and some very rudimentary icon punches with a knuckle, but that is it. He has a Samsung Galaxy S6. He does not like the way ‘Hey Google’ works, but does like the Google assistant. I have been trying to help him and cannot figure out how to turn off ‘Hey Google’. They compete with each other and cause problems. Can you tell me how to turn off ‘Hey Google’? I have tried to search on the web, but all their tips are for older android phones. The Google community has not been much help either. They either give me the old info or just ignore me. Any info you could give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Hi Charlie,
There’s an option to prevent Google from responding when the user says “Hey or OK Google”. To access it, open the Google app. Now, tap the round profile picture/image to open the settings interface. Now, tap settings option and then the Voice option. You’ll find an option called “Voice Match”. Tap this option and make sure that the “Access with Voice Match” setting is turned off.