You are now ready to try the Mac's Dictation option. 'Press Right Command Key Twice' to use speech recognition. It is good practice to set a keyboard shortcut, e.g. Enhanced Dictation is also considerably faster to use as you don't have to wait so long for your words to be converted into text. It is a good idea to select the Use Enhanced Dictation option, otherwise you will need to have a good wifi connection to use the program.

You will then be given an option to choose keyboard preferences, including an option to use Dictation.Ĭlick on Dictation, then turn Dictation On to make it available. To activate it, click on System Preferences, followed by Keyboard. The Dictation facility on the Mac can be used wherever you can type text as an option to using the keyboard. Click on Input and make sure that the correct microphone is selected - make sure that the Input level indicator moves significantly when you speak. Make sure that your Mac is using the correct microphone by clicking on the Apple icon in the top-left of your screen, then selecting System Preferences, followed by Sound. We recommend using a good USB microphone, such as the Andrea NC 181VM microphone (£29.95 from Iansyst). You have to set up the microphone before using any speech recognition program on your Mac.

The macOS version of Siri can be used for sending very short messages and interacting with your computer, but it cannot be used for dictating passages of text. In addition, the Siri voice interface used on iPhones and iPads was added to macOS Sierra in late 2016. These both allow you to dictate sentences and have your speech converted into text.

and the commercial Dragon program from Nuance.

the Dictation system built in to recent versions of the macOS.

There are two main options for speech recognition on the Mac:

Voice to text mac sierra