OS X’s Dictation feature
Why make your fingers do the typing when you can talk to your Mac?
Talk to your Mac, have it convert your speech to text, and control with voice commands
Anyone SKILL can LEVEL do it
IT WILL TAKE
1 hour
YOU’ll NEED
OS X 10.9 or later
Voice recognition on the Mac is nothing new. Years before Siri came to your iOS device – indeed, before there were any iOS devices – it was possible to control your Mac and execute commands by speaking them, Star Trek style (see the box below).
Siri, however, has certainly upped the ante. The amazing “intelligent assistant” on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch can carry out your commands, insert your dictated words into an email, and even answer your questions. It doesn’t always work flawlessly, but when it does, you feel like Captain Kirk conversing with the computer on the Enterprise.
OS X doesn’t provide all of Siri’s functionality on a Mac, but you can dictate text to it. Just as you can on your iPhone, you can sit at your computer, speak, and your words appear on the screen. Dictation works in any app which you can type into – Notes, TextEdit, Microsoft Word, forms on web pages in Safari, and so on. First, though, you need to turn it on in the Dictation & Speech pane in System Preferences.
Are you listening?
By default, an internet connection is required for Dictation to work, because it sends your spoken input to Apple’s massive server farms to be deciphered and converted into text. This is both a good and a bad thing. It means Apple can bring to bear vastly more processing power than any single personal computer can offer, and it allows Apple to steadily and silently improve its interpretation algorithms.
On the other hand, nothing appears on screen until you finish speaking and click Done to send your words to Apple, and there’s a very slightly unsettling lag while they’re deciphered.
Mavericks adds the ability to dictate text while your Mac is offline. It calls this Enhanced Dictation. Although it inherently lacks the benefits of performing translation on a server, it continuously translates your speech into text. Put a tick next to Use Enhanced Dictation to turn it on and OS X downloads an extra few hundred MB.
Dictation is not perfect. As with all speech-recognition software, it helps if you speak artificially clearly and distinctly; you have to remember to say ‘comma’ and ‘full stop’ and so on; and you need to spend a little time checking the text and correcting errors.
The online version of Dictation, while benefiting from the computing power of servers, also needs to transmit certain personal information to Apple, such as names from your Contacts so it knows how to spell them – click About Dictation and Privacy at the bottom of Dictation’s System Preferences pane to find out more about what is sent.
All that said, though, Dictation can be simply amazing. If you find typing difficult or just want a break from the keyboard, give it a try!