Microsoft is forming a new team focused on native Windows applications. That team needs to take notes on Speechify, which launched on the Microsoft Store. Coincidentally, developers could use Speechify to take those notes, as this app is great for dictation.
Speechify is worth covering on its own simply for its text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionality. It works great and I’m really enjoying it in my testing. I focused on that side of the application last week. when covering the launch.
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A Windows app that Microsoft should emulate
To be clear, there are plenty of great Windows apps that embrace Microsoft’s vision for PC computing. But Speechify is new and shiny, so it gives us a good opportunity to focus on the approach Microsoft and other developers should take.
Speechify is not just a web wrapper inside a window (looking at you Copilot, clipchampand Perspective). Speechify tried its best to fully adopt the Windows application platform. The application is available in amd, Inteland snapdragon chips, is native, and uses WinUI 3. It’s the exact type of app Microsoft should be building.
Speechify worked with Microsoft to create the new Windows app.
Because Speechify is a native app, it works across apps, you can use real-time text input in any text field, it supports OCR-based text capture from your screen, and you can protect things locally using Windows encryption.
Speechify can take advantage of a Nuclear Nuclear Unit inside a Copilot+ PCor work with GPU acceleration. You can also set it to run through the cloud or on your PC locally.
Arguably the smoothest integration is the way it works with everything in Windows. You can enter text by simply holding down the Alt key, it feels like I’m recording a voice memo and then it just transcribes my words directly into any text field you want.
Listening to text is just as fluid. The default is to hold down the Alt and A keys to start reading the selected text with your preset voice. If you are on the web, the speech length is a good plugin for text-to-speech, but you can also use the Speechify app.
As good as it is, Speechify is not perfect. It has a few quirks, such as the lack of ability to resize the window, you can use it as the default size or double-click the title bar to go full screen.
Microsoft needs to emulate Speechify approach to building Windows apps, such as supporting all chip architectures at launch, placing the app in the Microsoft Store, and using WinUI 3 to create a native app instead of a web container.
Fortunately, Huyn is no stranger to native app development. This time next year, I predict I’ll be writing similar articles about some new or improved apps created by Microsoft for Windows 11.
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