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.

Speech to text mac