3 Alternatives To Using macOS Dictation

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today, let me show you three alternatives to using macOS Dictation. 

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So macOS Catalina has two different built-in methods for doing dictation. But if neither of those seem to work well for you here are three alternatives for dictating text.

So you have two ways to do this just using macOS. The first is in System Preferences go to Keyboard, go to Dictation, Enable Dictation, and then you can press the fn key twice and dictate some text. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period). The other method is to go into Accessibility and then use Voice Control. Once you enable that that includes powerful dictation tools far beyond the basic stuff (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period).

Now those two options should work in just about any app. But sometimes it doesn't work in specific situations and sometimes depending upon probably you voice, your accent, your speed of talking, and all sorts of other things it doesn't work very well for dictating large documents. So you have some other things that you can try.

First, if you are a Microsoft Word user and you have the current version of Word. The current version is version 16. Of course you have your subscription setup and your signed in, then in your Home ribbon here you should see a Dictate button. Now this is different than macOs' built-in dictation. In fact you can use that as well. You can even see it here if you go to Edit, Start Dictation. So you can use the regular dictation tools in Word. But if you click this Dictate button it will use Microsoft Word's built-in dictation. (the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period). You just click it again to turn it off.

Now option two is to use Goggle Docs. So Goggle Docs is free. You get to it by just signing into your Goggle account, which is your gmail account for most people. You go to Docs at goggle.com and you start a new word processing document and right in here you've got, under Tools, Voice Typing. Now this is important because macOS' built-in dictation won't work here. It simply doesn't recognize this as a text entry area because this is all specialized web app code here. 

Now one really important thing. You have to use the Chrome web browser for this. The voice dictation function uses an extension that, I guess, doesn't meet Safari's security requirements. So it only works in Chrome. So I know I'm going to get some comments about this, why isn't it working. People not seeing this tool in Goggle Docs. So keep this in mind. You have to be using the latest version of Chrome for this to work.

So click on Tools and then Voice Typing or you can see it's Command Shift S. You see this button right here. Click it and go. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog).

If you don't like either of those two options here's another one. Go to Dictation.io. There there is a tool to allow you to dictate to a simple text document here. You an actually type in it as normal but you can also use the dictation function. Now this also needs to run in the Goggle Chrome browser just like with Goggle Docs because it's using, probably, the same technology that Goggle Docs is. So here we'll start and try it out. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period). So the idea here is that when you're done you can copy and paste what you've got. Or you can hook it up with some other different types of services as well. So it might be good for dictating a block of text if nothing else is working well for you and then copying and pasting it an email or Page document or whatever.

I think when choosing one of these methods you basically have to try them all out and see which works better for you. I would, of course, recommend using the macOS default stuff first particularly using Voice Control if you plan on doing a lot of dictation. But if you plan on just dictating single sentences, little text messages, a bit here and a bit there, then use the keyboard dictation function. The Microsoft Word function only works if you already have a Microsoft Word subscription. If you are a Word user, using that for all of your word processing, then that's probably your best option. After that I would go with Goggle Docs unless you really don't want to use Goggle services. Then maybe try that dictation.io site which also could be really useful for using a friend's computer or another computer. You don't want set any of those other things up and you just need to do some quick writing using dictation.