To use Dictation, you need internet connection. Please make sure your connection is working.

Anonymous
2020-07-07T20:22:25+00:00

Hi

Users are getting the subject message when trying to use Dictate in Office 365 E3 subscription.

The internet is ‘working’, apps signed in with O365 accounts so there is seems to be either a security profile setting, proxy filter or firewall issue. A lot of searching and I found very little documentation on this message, and certainly cannot find a definitive answer as to what/if Dictation requires certain firewall ports open nor what security profile setting to check in GPO which may apply. 

The following TechNet article suggested reviewing O365 Org Settings and Privacy but anything relating to Speech seems fine.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/8111bb05-c674-4c43-a841-cae849b6a064/office-dictate-word-quotto-use-dictation-you-need-internet-connectionquot-specific?forum=Office2016ITPro

These options are managed by the organisation but where do I look in the Admin portal to enable Dictate?

Any pointers welcome.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Subscription, account, billing | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-11-12T05:54:30+00:00

    ok, thank you

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-11-13T21:59:38+00:00

    Huh. This fixed it for me as well. I guess the reboot remains the tried and true approach....

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-01-02T18:02:37+00:00

    I have been having intermittent problems with Dictation in Word (I have a personal M365 subscription and am on the preview channel: Build 13530.20264). Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. I would say the split is 80% of the time it is not working and 20% of the time it is working. However, Dictation works in both Outlook (desktop app) and PowerPoint all the time. 

    When it doesn't work, I get the error saying "you need Internet connection." After further testing, I've learned that the way I use Word appears to be contributing to the problem. What I do is open a blank file in Word without saving it. I then dictate text into the blank Word file and then cut and paste it into documents I am editing (Word, Outlook emails, Excel, etc.). I should note that I've been using Word this way for at least a year and have only run into this problem in the last month or two.

    I can avoid the error by saving the empty Word file to my personal OneDrive account. This turns on AutoSave and Dictation works.

    I've sent in feedback reports so hopefully this will get fixed. I just wanted to document my fix in case it helps someone else.

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  4. Anonymous
    2021-01-04T20:09:38+00:00

    Hello and thanks for sharing your workaround - this issue is sometimes caused when one of our background services hasn't yet initialized, usually in a new blank document. Writing some text and running the Editor feature on the Home tab, or saving the file are a few options to workaround for now. We've also made a permanent fix that will prevent this issue from happening in the future. That should be in production in mid-February, and as always, Insiders will get it first.

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  5. Anonymous
    2021-01-21T03:15:59+00:00

    Thank you for this information.  Could you let me know when you have a bug fix for this. Disappointed that dictate does not work with perpetual versions

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