Microsoft is building a new team focused on native Windows applications. That team needs to take notes on Speechify, which launched in the Microsoft Store. Coincidentally, the developers could use Speechify to take those notes, since 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 really well, and I'm really enjoying it in my testing. I focused on that side of the app last week when covering the launch.
I wrote most of this article with Speechify, though I've had to jump in and make a few edits to improve the flow of the piece.
But it also stands out as a Windows app that truly embraces the Windows platform. It's the perfect example of what Microsoft should be trying to make right now.
As Rudy Huyn and his new team that he's forming try to revamp the Windows app experience using native applications, Speechify could be used as a template.
A Windows app Microsoft should emulate
To be clear, there are a ton of great Windows applications that embrace Microsoft's vision for computing on PCs. But Speechify is new and shiny, so it gives us a good chance to focus on the approach Microsoft and other developers need to take.
Speechify isn't just some web wrapper inside of a window (looking at you Copilot, Clipchamp, and Outlook). Speechify went above and beyond to fully embrace the Windows app platform. The app is available on AMD, Intel, and Snapdragon X chips, it's native, and it uses WinUI 3. It's the exact type of app that Microsoft should be making.
Speechify worked with Microsoft to make the new Windows app.
Because Speechify is a native app, it works across applications, can use real-time text input into any text field, supports OCR-based text capture from your screen, and can secure things locally using Windows encryption.
Speechify can take advantage of an NPU inside a Copilot+ PC, or work with GPU acceleration. You can also set it to run through the cloud or run on your PC locally.
Arguably, the smoothest integration is how it just works with everything in Windows. You can input text just by holding the Alt key down, it feels like I'm recording a voice memo, and then it just transcribes my words directly into any text field I want.
Listening to text is just as smooth. The default is you hold down Alt and A to start reading selected text in your preset voice. If you're on the web, the Speechify extension is a nice add-on for text-to-speech, but you can also just use the Speechify app.
As good as it is, Speechify is not perfect. It has some quirks, like its lack of ability to resize the window, you can either use it as its default size or double-click the title bar to go full screen.
Microsoft needs to emulate Speechify's approach to building Windows apps, such as supporting all chip architectures at launch, putting the app in the Microsoft Store, using WinUI 3 to make a native app rather than a web wrapper.
Luckily, Huyn is well-versed in native app development. By this time next year, I predict I'll be writing similar articles about some new or improved Microsoft-made apps for Windows 11.
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