#DICTATE APP FOR MAC PRO#
#DICTATE APP FOR MAC SOFTWARE#

This may reflect insufficient development and testing of non-US speech.Ĭatalina’s Voice Control is an extremely frustrating product. What was more surprising was how much better my very Eastern Atlantic speech worked with Voice Control switched over to US English: dictation was far more usable than with UK English, and straight control seemed to work first time with almost everything. The round trip time for each command is quite noticeable: you say “Click Cancel”, for example, and a few seconds elapse before the Cancel button is magically clicked, but it does work a great deal of the time. When dictating in UK English, I could only speak 3-4 words at a time, then had to wait a few seconds until they had been correctly recognised, before I could continue.Ībandoning dictation as frustration, I then tried out Voice Control using UK English, which is rather better.

#DICTATE APP FOR MAC PRO#

I tested this out using the internal microphone in my brand new MacBook Pro 16-inch, which has an 8-Core i9 processor with 16 GB of memory, and at the time was otherwise very lightly loaded. Given how well Enhanced Dictation performs with UK English, I was expecting even better performance than in Mojave. The snag is that it doesn’t work at all well at the moment, as far as I can tell, and there are significant differences in performance between languages too.Īpple’s note states that the speech recognition for Voice Control is performed by the Siri engine when you have opted for US English, but for all other languages the same engine is used that was in Enhanced Dictation. Activate it by saying “Wake up” or clicking on its button, and deactivate it using “Go to sleep” or clicking Sleep.Īpple details this extensively in this support note although not a comprehensive reference, it’s a good starting point for exploring what Catalina can offer. When Voice Control is enabled, a small floating window with a microphone is its on-off control. And you can add your own, which can be app-specific or global, and can invoke scripts and perform all sorts of useful actions.

#DICTATE APP FOR MAC SOFTWARE#

Your Mac will then download additional software – for UK English, 422 MB – and you are then ready for both voice control and dictation.Ĭlick on the Commands… button and you’ll discover how these not only include an extensive suite for editing text, but a great many for controlling your Mac. Instead, go to the Accessibility pane, to its new Voice Control item, where you should select which language you want to use and tick Enable Voice Control. For someone used to Enhanced Dictation, this is very poor indeed. This means it lacks all the useful formatting commands, like ‘new paragraph’, and will turn itself off after a few moments without speech input. The old Dictation tab is still in the Keyboard pane, but Enhanced Dictation has been removed. If you’re looking to be able to control your Mac entirely by voice, then Dictation isn’t much help: you’ll need an alternative input device or third party software, most probably both.Īpple’s goal in Catalina has been to address that gap, but in doing so it is dictation which has suffered. Dictation is no substitute for a general input device such as a mouse or trackpad. Where previous versions of macOS have fallen short is in voice control. As its performance is specific to individuals, you may find it too inaccurate, but it’s quickly set up and can work really well for dictation. Accuracy is always a problem, and macOS doesn’t appear to ‘learn’ your voice or vocabulary. For someone with limited use of the wrists, hands or fingers it is a realistic alternative to the keyboard they would struggle with. In my experience, Enhanced Dictation is a very effective way to enter and edit quite substantial documents. Once enabled and set up, to use dictation all you do is press your designated key, by default the Function key pressed twice, and speak away when you’ve placed the insertion point in a view which accepts text input. There’s an option to enable additional or ‘advanced’ commands there, and you can enable/disable individual items from the list, but you can’t add any custom commands. Oddly, to access the commands available when dictating, you have to switch to the Accessibility pane, where the Dictation item offers a button Dictation Commands… which displays the set of built-in commands such as Select previous word.

For this, I turned on Enhanced Dictation although I don’t use this regularly, I have used it over several versions of macOS and am familiar with its performance. In Mojave, Dictation is controlled in the tab of that name in the Keyboard pane. Following a couple of comments here, I’ve turned my attention to dictation and voice control, and how they’ve changed in Catalina. Making Macs more accessible is a minefield of conflicting requirements in which it’s so easy to address one requirement and lock many other users out.

Dictate app for mac