6> Speak your terms

The continued absence of Siri on the Mac is disappointing. A trick to smooth things over is to combine Spotlight’s natural language search with OS X’s Enhanced Dictation feature, so you can speak your search terms directly into Spotlight. First turn on Enhanced Dictation in System Preferences > Dictation & Speech. When the required download completes, press ç+[ Spacebar] to open Spotlight, and double-tap ƒ to open to open dictation. Speak your search terms and results will appear; you can keep saying words to refine them. Double-tap ƒ again to stop dictating and use Spotlight’s keyboard shortcuts to browse the results.