20 Voice Control Dictation Tips

Dictation on the Mac is pretty powerful as long as you are using Voice Control Dictation instead of standard Dictation and you know some of the commands you can use to perfect your text.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some voice control dictation tips.
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Now there are two different types of dictation you can use on your Mac. The first type you enable by going to System Settings and then scroll down and go to Keyboard. Then under Keyboard look for Dictation. Turn that on and then notice the Keyboard Shortcut that you're using. So in this case let's set it to press the Control Key twice. So to use it you would use the Keyboard Shortcut and then you would speak what you want to dictate. Then you could use the Keyboard Shortcut again, usually just tapping it once and it will turn off and you would activate it again the next time you needed it. Speaking: (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period). This is really handy for typing things like text messages. It lacks a lot of the more advanced features you could use for the other type of dictation. 
To enable the other type of dictation instead of keyboard go to Accessibility. In Accessibility look for Voice Control. Go in there. You can select the language that you're using to dictate. You can select a microphone if you have more than one. Also, you could click the Command button and see a long list of special commands. Some of these are for controlling your Mac. Like the first section here is Basic Navigation. Voice Control is a combination of being able to control your Mac with your voice and use dictation. If you're just going to do dictation you don't need to worry about these navigation controls. Instead you can skip right down to the sections here that have to do with dictation. You've got a Dictation Section, you've got Text Selection, you've got other things like, for instance, Text Navigation and Text Editing. 
I'm going to switch on Voice Control and notice I'll get a little indicator on the screen. I can use that to sleep or wakeup voice control. So you don't have to use it all the time. Once you turn it on here you can kind of Pause it. (Paused) So by clicking Sleep there I paused it. Now it shows Wakeup. It does show in the microphone that it is hearing my voice. It's just not using it for Voice Control right now. So now if I want to dictate in Pages I'll click here to Wakeup and then I'll dictate. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period). You can see I clicked there to stop it so I can continue talking in this tutorial without it transcribing everything I say. So now let's get to the tips.
So the power behind Voice Control is you have all these different commands you can use to help with your dictation. So let's start by looking at how to simply delete the last thing that you said because sometimes it gets it wrong. In that case you could use, simply, Delete That and it will delete the last part that was transcribed. (The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog period Delete that.) So if I were to do this in sections it would only delete the last section. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Delete That). You could also say Delete Previous and then give it a number and then words like this. Delete Previous 2 words. Now whenever you specify a unit of text, like words, you can also say Character, Sentence, Line, or Paragraph. Delete Previous 3 characters. 
Now it is even easier to delete things if you know you can speak a phrase instead of just deleting what's before the blinking text cursor. So, for instance, if I wanted to delete the words quick and brown I could do that like this. Delete quick brown. Notice now the blinking text cursor is right where the deletion happened. It's just like if I selected the text with the mouse or trackpad and hit the Delete key. But what if, at this point, I just wanted to continue typing. How would I jump to the end? Well, you could do that simply with Move To End. (Move To End). You could also say Move and then before or after and then a word or phrase. (Move before jumps. Move after lazy.) Now you can also use Move and then Up, Down, Left, Right to basically simulate the arrow keys. (Move left Move right). You can also say Move Forward and Back and then give it a number of characters, words, sentences, lines, or paragraphs. (Move back 7 characters Move back 3 words Move forward 5 words). Now if you want to select something you could say Select and then the word or phrase to select. (Select jumps over). You can also say Select Previous or Next and then a number of words. (Select next 2 words Select previous 3 words). Now you can also extend the selection by saying Extend Selection and then the number of words or Extend Selection Back and the number of words. (Extend Selection 2 words Extend Selection Back 1 word). 
At this point I want to stop and go back into System Settings here and click the Commands button. Then take a look at some of these in here because you get a lot of detail in the description. So if I look for Extend I could see what I was just using and you could see here I could say Extend Selection by say 7 characters or words or sentences. I could also say Extend the selection Forward By and then a number of characters or words or whatever. So there are sometimes variations. Variations are very important because if you find the way you speak it won't recognize Extend Selection 7 words. That just doesn't work. You could try the alternative. Extend the Selection forward by 7 words and see if that works better. Here's another example. You could say Move To End of line. Move to the end of the line. Go to end of line. Go to the end of the line. If you find something isn't working for you first check here and look at the description. Make sure you are at least using one of these. It's very easy to fall into a speech pattern that is similar to one of these but not exactly right. If you are using one exactly as written but it is still not working try one of the variations. It may work better for you.
Now if the reason you are doing the selection is to replace one thing with another then you can skip making the selection and just use the Replace command. (Replace fox with wombat. Replace quick with fast.) You could also use Insert to insert a word before another word like this. (Insert super before fast. Insert slow after the 2). Notice there the word the was ambiguous. There were two of them there. So it gave me numbers and I had to choose a number by saying the number. This works with a lot of different commands. Like Selection, Replace, Insert, and all of that. If it is ambiguous which one you mean it is going to give you some numbers to choose from. 
Now, of course, sometimes dictation gets it wrong. Actually quite often! That's why you need to work at it and make corrections. Now you can use Correct That to see variations and maybe choose a different variation on what you said. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period Correct That 2), Of course that is just an example. It got it right the first time in that case. But you can actually say Correct and then a phrase like this. Correct jumped over. Now even if none of the suggestions are right you can simply take what had been selected as a selection and then speak the correct thing at that point. (Correct jumped over,  jumps over). Now sometimes you may have trouble speaking a command and instead it takes what you said and uses that as text. If so you can actually put Voice Control into Command Mode where it will not take anything as dictation and only try to listen for commands. (Move back 3 words Delete That Command Mode Move back 3 words Dictation Mode). So you can see there how I put it into Command Mode in order to issue the command, not have it mistaken for dictation text, and then I put it back into Dictation Mode. 
There's also a third mode called Spelling Mode. This is new in macOS Ventura. Once you set it to Spelling Mode it's going to just listen for letter names so you could spell something out. (Spelling Mode g a r y Dictation mode). But there is another way to spell things out. You can use the phrase Press The Key and then the key name and do it that way. It even works if you add Shift or Option to it. (Press The Key Shift g  Press The Key a Press The Key r Press The Key y), 
One very difficult thing to do with dictation is type a word that's also a punctuation mark like for instance this. It's hard to type the word period. Let's try it again but I'm going to use the word period twice, once for the word and once for the punctuation mark. It's hard to type the word period period  So sometimes you can trick it like that but it varies by situation, by the context, and sometimes it is just impossible. You have to just type out the word as best you can. 
You can also type emoji characters but to do that you need to know the name of the emoji. So I'm going to use the keyboard here and do Control Command Space or you can use the Globe Key and e and I'm going to move my pointer over one of the emoji. You can see it gives me the name of these emojis here. So I could remember the name of one, like grinning face, and I could use that. (Grinning Face emoji)(Heart emoji)(Canadian Flag emoji).
Back here in System Settings there's a button here for vocabulary. You can use the Plus button and add your own vocabulary words to the list of words that should be recognized in dictation. But you could also do that by selecting a word and then adding it. So after typing it out or using a method to spell it out with dictation you can select it and then say, Add To Vocabulary. Now you'll see it appear here in the list. 
Another thing you can do here is in Commands you can add a special command. You can use a Plus button here and then you could put a When I Say. So for instance it is having trouble capitalizing MacMost properly. So I'm going to put MacMost and then When Using Any Application. Then Perform and Paste Text. So the text is going to be MacMost with the second M capitalized. Notice here it pasted with a Style which is unfortunate. I can actually go and type using the Style I'm working in and then copy that and then here I can change this to use the right Style. But unfortunately that is just the right Style for now. It may not be the right Style the next time I'm using it in a document. Then on the other hand being able to paste text with styling could be useful in other situations. 
Now when you speak numbers sometimes it will do it as a digit, sometimes it will do it as a number. For instance, (the number 3 period). 1, 2, 3. So you can see it knew with a succession of numbers I probably wanted digits. But when I wanted 3 just by itself it put the number three. What if I actually wanted it to use the digit 3. Well, I could use the word numeral for that. (The number numeral 3 period). You could also use that to make sure it's using a number when it may interpret it as something else. (The number 2 Delete that) (The number numeral 2).
If you want to capitalize a word you can select it and use the phrase Capitalize That. (There is something going on here Select something Capitalize That)  There are other phrases you can use as well. You can see Capitalize That and the variations. You can use Capitalize and the phrase. So I didn't have to do selection there. I could have just said Capitalize something. You can do lower case. You can do upper case. You can even do Bold, Italics, and Underline. 
Now I'm going to show you the most powerful phrase to use when dictating. It's actually the same as the most powerful command you would use while typing. When typing the most important thing to know that you can do is Undo, Command Z. Well, you can Undo That in dictation as well. It's important to know this because it is more powerful than most other things. So using Undo allows you to go back multiple steps. Replace lazy with sleepy. Delete brown. Insert cute before sleepy. Undo That. Undo That. Undo That. In addition you can also use Copy, Cut, and Paste in dictation. So here are some examples. Select jumps over. Copy That. Move To End. Paste That. Select quick. Cut That. Move To End. Paste That. 
There are a lot of different commands if you just look through the list. Check each one out and see how it is used and what the variations are. Remember that you have to meet Voice Control halfway. It will try to interpret what you are saying but it won't always get it right. Sometimes it needs you to speak slower, more clearly. You've got to have a little bit of spacing between the words that you're saying. Sometimes you have to say a word slightly different than what you're used to in order for dictation to work. It is easy to get frustrated with it. I know. Remember that if you can type but you would just rather use dictation you could always combine the two. You could always use dictation with your hand on the keyboard and still use the Delete keys, selection with the trackpad or mouse. You could type a few words here and there. You can dictate other words and kind of combine them so you can type in the most efficient way for you. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 14 Responses to “20 Voice Control Dictation Tips”

Jack Gilmore

2 years ago

with voice control dictation you can simultaneously use the keyboard and trackpad to move around the text doing edits/insertions, etc., and the dictation does not shut off. (I think Ventura may be required) This feature makes it especially effective and on a par with dictation offered by Microsoft. However, with standard dictation it is much more limiting because the moment you touch the keyboard or trackpad dictation shuts off. It's really a key difference.

Gary Rosenzweig

Jack: Ventura isn't required. Voice Control dictation has always allowed keyboard input at the same time.

Will

Thank you Gary. This is really helpful. I use dictation a great deal and sometimes do so to read a piece of text and copy it into a document. Other times I speak with my eyes closed so that I can concentrate on what I want to say. However, if there are errors in the text that has been dictated, it can be helpful to use the record function on another device at the same time so there is a way of retrieving my actual words.

Lawrence j Diggs

Thanks. This was helpful.

Ray Whitehead

Gary, following your suggestion I got dictation to work, BUT if I leave it and come back an hour later it won't work without a reboot. After the reboot it will continue working until I leave it for a while. Sounds crazy. Any thoughts as to how I might proceed?

Ray: Have you tried other things like turning it off and on again (in Settings, not just putting it to sleep)?

Geoff

One of the most informative and helpful videos Gary - I've been wasting a lot of type finger typing for text or commands - maybe because I, like I sure a lot of others, don't investigate the functionality provided in " Accessibility". Many thanks

David Van Nuys

Thanks, Gary! This is the most valuable video yet!

Barry Standley

My old Dragon Dictation app gave up the ghost this past week, and that company no longer makes a version for the Mac. Thanks to this video I am now using the second dictation method described, through Voice Control, and I find it to be — so far — just about equivalent to Dragon. With the dictation I've done tonight the only bug I have found has been an absence of capitalization even though I've given the command to do that. It doesn't do it all the time, just on some words. Thank you Gary!

Tom Merrill

Gary, there's commands I use that are missing or didn't work as described.
1. When I say "New Line" or "New Paragraph" it automatically carriage returns 1 or 2 respectively. Great help in iMessage or Zoom chat where typing the carriage return "Sends" that message.
2. Your description of forcing a numeral (1) vs the word spelled out (one) didn't work for me.
3. 3rd issue - voice typing the dash (-). Works here but only infrequently in IOS. Tried "Hyphen" which works for a while then no more

Paul Sonnenberg

1 year ago

Is it possible to use Voice Control WITHOUT also activating dictation? I keep coming back to fields and finding all the curse words I directed at my dogs. I almost changed the title of my entire department's Quip journal to "I hate $@&*! Quip why the $@&*! can't we use something else!"

Paul: No way to have it set up like that.

Abdullah

hello, (DELETE THAT ) is not responding, when I say the word it keeps typing and it doesn't delete. I tried to (delete the previous ) one, but It's not responding, It keeps typing please assist.

Abdullah: Sorry, not sure why it isn't working for you.

Comments Closed.

20 Voice Control Dictation Tips

Comments: 14 Responses to “20 Voice Control Dictation Tips”

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