How To Control Your Mac With Your Voice in macOS Catalina

With the new Voice Control feature in macOS Catalina you can control almost anything on your Mac with your voice. You can access menu commands, dictate text, click buttons and even click a specific point on the screen using grids. This functionality is critical for some, but for others it can also offer a nice hands-free alternative to using your Mac.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can almost completely control your Mac with your voice in macOS Catalina.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 500 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it, join us, and get exclusive content.
Apple completely revamped voice control in macOS Catalina. It added a ton of functionality to it. Plus it works really smoothly now. Let me show you how you can enable voice control and basically do almost anything that you do with the mouse and keyboard but only using your voice. 
To turn on Voice Control go to System Preferences, then Accessibility, and then scroll down and look for Voice Control. Here you've got the enable Voice Control checkbox. Before you do that check the language to the one you are using and your Microphone, if you have multiple microphones. You can also choose whether or not a sound plays when it recognizes a command. The click Commands and you'll see a list of commands. You can actually click on one of them and see variations as well. 
We're going to move this over to the side here so we can refer to it as we go through. Let's turn on Voice Control and it will take a few seconds to get going. Once it's on you've got this little control here. You can move this box around to wherever you want. It's either going to say Sleep or Wake Up. So you can click that to put it to sleep or click it to get it to wakeup if it's already asleep. I'm going to put it to sleep a lot so I can talk to you without it misinterpreting what I'm saying as a command.
So let's take a look at the Commands here and we can see one of the most basic one is to simply open up an Application. We can do that by saying Open and the Application name. (Open TextEdit)  Now to click a button on the screen, like we want to hit this New Document button, you just say Click and the name of the button. (Click New Document) Now we can do a lot of other things with an application when it's opened. We can Hide it by saying Hide Application. We can Quit it by saying Quit Application. Or if the application is one we're not currently using, like it's running in the background, we can say Hide and the application name or Quit and the application name. You can also say Save Document and Close Window. Open Document is a shortcut to getting to what most apps have which is File Open. 
Now you're also in Dictation mode when you have Voice Control on. So anything that is not a Command is going to be typed. So we can type here in this TextEdit document pretty easily. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.) Now there are a ton of ways to edit what you're typing. I'm not going to get into those here. I'm going to stick to controlling your Mac rather than dictation. But if you want you can look through Dictation here and see there are different things you can say. There's different things for text selection and editing your text as well. Even moving the cursor around inside of the text. 
Now if you want to control anything that's in the Menus all you need to do is say Click and then the name of the menu and then the word Menu. Once you're in the Menu you can say Click and the name of the item. (Click Format Menu) (Click Make Rich Text) Notice there how there were numbers as well. So I could have said the number instead of the name of the item.
What about Buttons? Like you have these toolbar buttons here. So if I want to control the font I'm going to have to use the name of this button. The name right now is Helvetica. So I'm going to need to say that. (Click Helvetica, one) Now what about something that doesn't have a name. Like here's the Color button. If I click that I can choose one of these colors. But what do I even call these? Well, there's a way to click anywhere you want on the screen using Grids. You can find the grids by going down to Overlays and Mouse. You can do Show Grid or Show Window Grid and then you can Hide Grid or Choose a number or just say the number. You can also say Click and then the number.
Let me show you how it works. (Show Grid, 2, 10) (Click 16) (Show Grid, 2, 19) (Click 14) You can keep digging down to the pixel level. Using Show Window Grid will show you a grid just over the current window rather than the entire screen. Now you can also say Show Numbers to select things. (Show Numbers, Click 7, Show Numbers, 15, 4) Show Numbers brings up virtually anything that's on the screen. Between Show Grid and Show Numbers you can click just about anywhere pretty quickly. Note that you can also say Double Click, Triple Click, Long Press and even Click and Hold.
There's even a way to select or drag objects using this although it's really tricky. You have to use a combination of these commands. It takes some practice and it doesn't always work. So let's look at a practical example. Let's create a Pages document, add some text to it, and Save it.
Quit TextEdit, Open Pages, Click New Document, Click Blank, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Save document. My test document. Show Numbers, 6, 5. Click Save, Show Numbers, 1. Quit Pages.
How about sending an email? Open Mail. Show Numbers, 5. Mark Davidson. Press Return. Show Numbers, 27. This is a Test. Show Numbers, 30. Hello Mark exclamation point. Show Numbers, 4. Quit Mail
You can also browse the web pretty easily. Open Safari. Wikipedia.org. Press return. The War of 1812. Press Return. Scroll down. Move down. Show Numbers, 72. Show Numbers, 49. Show Numbers, 15. Click Bookmark's Menu, 5. Click Add. Quit Safari.
Now it's definitely far from perfect. Dictation takes practice and you always have to make corrections. I find it works best when you can use the keyboard at the same time as you're dictating to correct some things. Sometimes the commands don't quite work. Sometimes you ask for it to show menus and it doesn't. Sometimes you ask for it to show grid and it doesn't. Now, of course, there are those who need this functionality to use their Macs. But even if you don't need Voice Control sometimes it's nice to basically sit back and give your fingers a rest and browse the web or catch up on your correspondence just by using your voice.

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Control Your Mac With Your Voice in macOS Catalina”

Jim

4 years ago

Am I correct in understanding voice commands don't work with Microsoft apps -- WORD XCEL etc?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jim: Haven't tried them, but Voice Control should be at the system level. They should work. Try it.

Comments Closed.

How To Control Your Mac With Your Voice in macOS Catalina

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Control Your Mac With Your Voice in macOS Catalina”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information