It seems to me that the death of Steve Jobs has resulted in a definite decline in the utility, the coolness, the efficiency and vision of those at Apple. My iMac using Yosemite 10.2.2 sucks in comparison to the 10.68 OS. Dragon Dictate was tried by me on at least 2 occasions and is shabby in comparison to DNS.Īny app that eats up so much Memory and delivers such poor function should be eliminated unless Mac routinely come with 32 GB of RAM or more. Even the first version is far superior to what is now on the newer Mac OS. I was one of the original users of Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) on the PC. The difficulty seen in turning off dictation in Yosemite (force quit within Activity Monitor so far is working) based on reviewing comments on Google is testimony to my accusation above. If Dictation was previously turned off, it would remain so and the Enhanced ability will not be turned on until you enable Dictation again.ĭictation support first appeared in OS X Mountain Lion, and Enhanced Dictation requires OS X Mavericks or newer.ĭictation on the Mac is another example of a pseudo-upgrade that instead of enhancing results in the exact opposite. Depending on what the settings were prior to upgrading to the latest version of OS X, you may need to turn the feature on while in the settings panel. Some users will find that Enhanced Dictation is enabled by default, though the download of the offline support will trigger manually upon the first usage of Dictation. Users can also customize the Dictation trigger to be a single key press or a keystroke if desired.

Going beyond the standard talk to text abilities, you can even specify commands like punctuation, caps lock, upper and lower case, paragraphs, line breaks, spaces, returns, special characters, and much more as you will find here. Now just start talking as usual, and your words and sentences will automatically appear on screen.ĭictation is smart enough to recognize pauses and prolonged pauses as simple punctuation, adding commas and periods, then capitalizing new sentences.

This summons a little microphone icon to signify it’s ready to receive voice input. Using Dictation for Speech-to-Text in Mac OS Xįor the unfamiliar, using Dictation is begun by double-tapping the “fn” (function) key from any text input window or box. Once enabled, all standard speech-to-text features work, including all the dictation commands, with or without internet access. If enabling Enhanced Dictation for the first time it will require a 785MB download from Apple’s servers, meaning you would want to enable this feature while you have an internet connection before you could use the full offline dictation feature. Be sure that Dictation is set to “On”, then check the box for “Use Enhanced Dictation”.

Choose the “Dictation & Speech” control panel, followed by the “Dictation” tab.Go to the  Apple menu and head to “System Preferences”.

Speech to text in word mac