Speech-to-text, without the hype

Browser dictation runs on your browser's built-in Web Speech API, which streams audio to a cloud speech engine and returns text in real time. That single piece of technology powers most of the free dictation tools on the web, including VoiceFlow, Google Docs voice typing, Speechnotes, and Dictation.io — which is why their accuracy is broadly similar and their real differences come down to interface, daily limits, and price rather than the underlying recognition. Posts here dig into that shared foundation: how spoken punctuation commands work, what causes misheard words, and where genuinely offline, on-device dictation is heading.

These posts differ from the how-to articles next door: articles walk through a specific task, while posts here step back to look at the state of the technology — what's actually possible with today's speech recognition, common misconceptions about accuracy, and where the underlying engines are, and aren't, improving. New posts go up as the technology changes meaningfully, not on a fixed schedule.