10 Interesting New macOS Ventura Features

Take a look at some of the new features coming to macOS with Ventura this fall, including Live Captions, the Clock app, new Spotlight features and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at ten interesting new features coming in macOS Ventura. 
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So when macOS Ventura comes out in the Fall there's going to be changes and new features in many apps. I've already showed you some of those in places like Mail, Notes, Reminders, and in the new System Preferences or Settings App. But there are lots of other new features sprinkled throughout macOS Ventura. Let me show you some of them. 
Whenever you're playing video in Ventura or in fact listening to any audio you can get something called Live Caption. This will take the audio and try to give you the text on the screen so it is doing it live. You can turn this on in System Settings, go to Accessibility, from there go to Live Captions and you can see its beta. I'm going to turn it On here. You can see here's where it appears. Now unfortunately this doesn't work very well with Screen Capture. So I'm going to switch over to a camera on the screen right here and we can see it in action. I'm going to start playing this video and as you can see it's going to try and show the captions there at the bottom of the screen. The results are kind of laughable sometimes. It's definitely early in the beta here. There's a lot of improvement that needs to be made for this to be effective. One of the things you can do here, in addition to moving this window around, is you can actually stop Live Caption and then turn on the Microphone Mode. This will actually pickup your voice from the microphone or the voice of whoever else is in the room talking to you and you can see the words that they're saying on your screen. (Hi, this is me speaking live.) 
Now you're notice here in the Settings for this there is also a setting for turning this on for FaceTime. So you can use this to FaceTime and you can see the words that the other person is speaking. 
Now while we're here in the Accessibility settings if we look in audio we can see that there is Background Sounds. This is the functionality that we got on the iPhone in iOS 15, Play Background Sounds, and now we have it on our Mac. So we can choose the different sounds here. We can choose the Level and other settings and have that turned On. So that can be useful if you need Background Sounds to be able to focus or you can use them simply as noise generators, maybe to help you get to sleep. 
Now as always there are two different types of Dictation in macOS. There's the regular dictation and under Accessibility there is Voice Control. You can find that here under Motor and you can turn that On. Once you have that On, and you can see I've got it On here, I have that little control. Now there is a new trick in the Voice Control for the dictation inside of it. That is you can now spell things out. Let me spell out this word colon space key spelling mode abcxyz dictation mode period. 
We also got a couple of new apps in macOS that were previously only on the iPhone or iPad. One of those is Clock. So the Clock App looks exactly like it does on the iPad. We get this nice view here with the world and different world clocks. You get an alarm and you can set various alarms for different times. You get Stopwatch. You can start, stop, reset. You also get a Timer and you can set a timer and you can change the sound it plays at the end. You could also ask Siri to do it. Set a timer for five minutes.
In the Photos App or almost any App where you can look at images you can now Copy the subject of the image as well as the whole image itself. So here I am with this image here and I can Control Click it, that's two finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse and I get Copy just as before. But now I get Copy Subject. When I actually hover over that you can see it outline the subject. So it is not always going to be perfect but it does get the subject right here. I'll do Copy Subject. Now when I switch into another app and I Paste you can see it pastes just the subject there. Which can be useful in all sorts of different situations.
A new feature in Safari when you're creating Passwords is now when you click on the Password that you're about to fill in you get this thing called Other Options. You can Edit the password. You can choose your own password. You can set it to something easy to type, or using no special characters getting rid of the dashes. So it's handy for those poorly made websites that restrict the number of characters you can use in a password or don't let you use dashes or something like that. 
Also in the Photos App, now when you see Hidden and Recent Albums here, both of those are locked using your regular password or touch ID. So it's not as easy for somebody to get into those in case you forgot to log out of your Mac and somebody else has access. 
There's been some changes to Spotlight. One interesting change is that now when you Search for something and say you find a file like this, before you could use the Tab key to get a Preview of the file on the right. That no longer works. Instead you use Spotlight now. So, I will arrow down to one of these, let's go with this first one, do Spacebar and now Spotlight works to show you a Preview of what you have selected. If you go down to another file it changes to show you the Preview for that. Having the Preview in Spotlight was handy but having it in QuickLook is basically that same thing and I know that there were people before that complained that QuickLook didn't work in Spotlight. If you think it might make it harder to find images. Well note now when you search and you come up with results that are images, like here, you actually get a section like this, that says Photos from Apps. You have Show More but you have these little previews here and you can go through and select them.
Another change to Spotlight is now you can Search for both Shortcuts and Focus Modes and execute them right from Spotlight. So, for instance, in Shortcuts I have one called UpTime right here. I will Search for it and I can see it right there, and I can actually hit Return and it will run that Shortcut. So a new easier way to launch Shortcuts without having a long list of them right here you have to choose from. You can do the same thing for Focus Modes. So I have a Focus Mode called Evening and I can go down to that and turn on the Evening Focus Mode. 
Speaking of Focus Modes, if you go to System Settings and go to Focus you've got everything pretty much the same way it was before. But now you can also add Focus Filters. What do those do? Well, for certain apps you can filter out what is shown. So, for instance for Calendar I can choose for the Evening Filter here to only show me certain calendars and not others. So my work calendar might be Off in Evening filter and Others can be On. For Mail, for instance, I can have certain accounts that are On and others that are Off. Same thing for Messages and the people that I get messages from and in Safari for different tab groups. 
Speaking of Safari Tab Groups you can now Pin tabs inside of a Tab Group. I know a lot of people previously complained that you could only Pin tabs in the ungrouped tabs. But now each Tab Group can actually have its own Pin Tabs as well. 
So there are a bunch of new features to look forward to. I'm actually going to have another video like this one with even more features coming soon. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “10 Interesting New macOS Ventura Features”

Karl

3 years ago

Gary, do you like the new settings app? I wish there was an option to list the settings in alphabetical order, but I guess you can just use the search feature if you need to find something specific. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

Karl: I like it, yes, but not a big deal to me either way. I like mostly that it will be easier for Apple to add to it this way. You can see and alphabetical list like you can right now in the View menu or using the Dock icon.

Jasper

Does the spelling feature work for reading-out as well as dictation in Ventura?

I’ve often wanted to check long numbers for keying errors by having them read back. This doesn’t currently work because they’re read back as words (“one thousand”), rather than digit-by-digit (“one”, “zero”, “zero”, “zero”).

Jasper: No, I think that would be completely different.

Comments Closed.

10 Interesting New macOS Ventura Features

Comments: 4 Responses to “10 Interesting New macOS Ventura Features”

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