>> Hey, it's Susan Dellahanty [assumed spelling]
with college dessert, creating accessible online courses,
with a quick video
to demonstrate a cool free tool called Web Speech.
It's an API designed by Google.
And anybody who has a chrome browser can actually use it
to actually dictate into the browser
and it will type everything that you say directly into text.
Now, why would you want to use this?
Well, we are creating accessible courses,
so one of the reasons you would want to do it
for your course would be perhaps if you need
to create some lectures that you have that you already recorded
in audio files, perhaps on a recording device and you'd
like to easily transcribe them into text files
that you could upload to your website.
So, students that are visually disabled could download those
text files and access them very easily
at their leisure with a screen reader.
Text files are much smaller than audio files or video files.
So, this makes it easier to send lecture information online
and through emails.
And it also takes up a lot less storage on your computer.
Those were a couple of the other reasons.
In addition, you might want to actually --
let's say you have a podcast on your website,
it's not a bad idea and in particular
for accessible reasons, we want to provide
as many alternative media methods that we can
for the students to access the information.
And in some cases creating a transcript is going
to be required.
So, let's see, how do we use this tool.
Well, very simply you do need to use the chrome browser.
It can be on their PC or MAC, doesn't matter.
But you will need to actually open up the browser and type
in this search right up here.
It has to be exactly this URL that I've indicated.
I've included it on our course as a link as well,
so you can easily access that.
I'd recommend bookmarking that.
And all you need to do, once you're in here,
is if you are going to be playing a file from a recorder,
you would need to start that or you can just start talking
if you know what you're going to say.
And then you simply click on this little microphone here
and when it turns red it's going to start recording as you speak.
And you can do it for as long as you like.
It's really quite accurate
and can record quite a bit of information.
So, here it is.
It's actually going to record everything that I say
from this point on until I re-click
that microphone button again.
And then it will stop.
And at that point it will allow me to copy and paste all
that text right here in your screen and also allow me
to create an email where it can paste that text directly into it
and that will allow me to maybe do some last minute checks
for typos and that kind of thing
or add any additional information I'd
like to add at that time.
Now, one of the things that I found it's extremely accurate,
considering how quickly I'm speaking,
and I think that I would probably guestimate it's maybe
about 95 to 98% accurate at this time.
Now, the tool I believe is free at this time.
I don't know how long that's going to last.
But take advantage of it while you can.
Now, there are a lot of programs out there that cost money
that do exactly the same thing.
But being as simple as this is to use and free,
I certainly would take advantage of this if you need anything,
like transcription done at this time.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and stop the recorder.
And as you can see it's highlighted the text for me
and I can copy and paste that text right now and if you are
on a MAC or a PC it's going to be different,
but for my MAC I'm going to say, "Control C."
It's going to copy all that text right there.
And then I can click on the create the email button.
Puts that right there and it's going to default
to my personal email account, which is the one that comes
up if it's going to a default account.
And I'm going to just go ahead and go into my text box and type
in the information I just spoke.
And as you can see, it's pretty darn accurate.
One thing it didn't do is add periods.
But if you speak and you say the word period occasionally
when you want to end a sentence it will actually put a period
in there for you.
So, as you can see this is a pretty darn easy way
to transcribe some of your lecture content or even if you'd
like to send out instructions in an email
without having to type it up.
Hopefully that's helpful for you
and have fun trying it out on your own.