Once finished, you’ll see the results onscreen But just how accurate is it? Apple has done a pretty good job with Dictation – there are the occasionally mistakes, but on the whole it works extremely well and can be a great way to compose messages, mails, and even write short documents. Hopefully, your words will now appear accurately captured as text onscreen, as shown below. Anywhere you can enter text, use the shortcut key to start dictating Once you’ve finished speaking, click the Done button or press the shortcut key once. not the enhanced mode) lets you talk for up to 30 seconds at a time – which is fine for emails but not so great for Word documents where you’d typically enter longer passages of text. A small microphone icon pops up as shown below, ready for you to speak. Open an application (Pages in this example) and use the shortcut key that you setup earlier to start dictating. Once you’ve set all the options, you can start using Dictation in lots of apps where you’d typically type text – such as Pages, Mail or Notes.ĭictation is pretty simple to use and behaves pretty much as expected. Choose a shortcut key from the dropdown menu The default is set to press the Function key ( Fn) twice, though you can also choose any of the other options or even customise it to use practically any key combination. The next thing to do is to choose the shortcut key that you’ll use to activate Dictation within any document. Confirm that you want to enable dictation Once you’ve done that, set the radio button to On (it’s Off by default): Turn dictation on and select the input sourceīefore Dictation is actually enabled, a warning message is displayed informing you that your data and information will be sent to Apple. Below the mic, the current audio source is indicated – it defaults to the internal microphone, but you can change this by using the drop down arrow. Your computer’s microphone icon is shown on the left (with a dynamic ‘level’ indicator shown in purple as it picks up audio). Down at the bottom you’ll see the Dictation & Speech icon – click on this once to open the settings screen. To turn on Dictation, open up System Preferences either from the Settings icon in your Dock, or type Dictation into Spotlight.

How to enable dictation on mac