Mastering Voice Control Dictation On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me help you master voice control dictation on your Mac. 

Now there are two different types of dictation on your Mac. One is the relatively simple dictation, often called keyboard dictation. You turn it on by going to System Settings and then to Keyboard. Here you've got a setting for Dictation. You turn this On, you can activate it with a keyboard shortcut, and then basically speak a sentence instead of typing it. But you're limited as to what can do. It's really meant for typing just one sentence at a time or a short message or maybe a paragraph in an email. There's a deeper and more complex form of dictation that's called Voice Control Dictation. You find that under Accessibility and then go down to Motor and then Voice Control. 

Voice Control is a way for you to control your entire Mac with just your voice. But an important part of that is dictating text. You can use it just for text dictation if you like. Voice Control dictation gives you a lot more control. It is much better if you need to dictate all of the time or large documents or reply to email messages with many paragraphs. 

So to enable it you want to turn it On here. This adds a little button here in the Menu Bar and you can select it and turn it Off by using Stop Listening and you turn it On by using Start Listening. You can customize what it does here in System Settings. For instance I'm going to turn Off Hints. I'm going to turn Off Play Sound When Command is Recognized, I'm going to turn Off Overlay. This will kind of optimize it just for Dictation, not for the rest of the controls. Then you really want to get used to using this control to start and stop. You can also Speak these commands. So, for instance, if I start listening I can say Stop Listening. You can see how it stopped there. It's giving me a little feedback there. Now when it is not listening it's like voice control is off. Except it is listening for one thing and that's for me to say, Start Listening. You can see how it started listening there. So you can turn it On and Off with your voice like that or use this Menu Bar option. There's no keyboard shortcut for doing that because Voice Control assumes that you want to keep your hands off the keyboard. 

Now one of the most important parts of getting Dictation to work well has nothing to do with your settings. It has to do with the microphone itself. The actual hardware. The microphone is important. Having a good microphone certainly. But even more important than that is the distance from the microphone to your mouth. A lot of times we're trying to speak to our Macs for dictation when the microphone is in the body of the Mac, say like a Mac Mini, and it's on the other side of our desk or even under our desk. Fortunately a lot of people have MacBooks or are using an Apple Studio Display which has a microphone array and it is usually right in front of you when you're using your Mac. In other situations think about where the microphone actually is and how far that is from your mouth. Also, think about every time you've ever seen somebody recording audio, whether it is somebody recording a podcast or a singer on a stage, the microphone is usually right in front of their mouth. You should do the same if you want your Mac to pickup good audio. I'd say half the time that people are having trouble with features like dictation it is simply because their microphone is too far away. 

So now the hard part about using Voice Control Dictation is there are a ton of different commands. It's hard to remember them all unless you're just using it all of the time. You can see all of the commands here in System Settings by going to Commands, there's a button right there. It will list all of these commands here on the left. So to make things easier I'm going to break everything into sections. You can just focus on these sections you can master the main parts of Voice Control Dictation and then add more commands later on. The five main sets of commands I want to talk about are Typing Special Characters, Cursor Movements, Making Selections, Actions Without Selections, and Making Corrections. 

So when you have Voice Control Dictation on you basically just speak and it types. But then if you need something special, like say a punctuation mark, you actually just say the punctuation mark and it tries to use context to figure out that you mean punctuation mark and not the word. So, for instance, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period. So you can see there it gave me a period. You can say other punctuation marks like question mark, comma, semicolon, exclamation point. Whatever you want. But probably the most common ones you use is to be able to go to the next line or paragraph by simply saying, New Line. Now you can find an official list of all the punctuation marks and different special characters that are supported by searching for Commands for Dictating Text on Mac at Apple's support site. Most of them are fairly obvious as to what to say to get that punctuation mark. 

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Next let's talk about Cursor Movement. The cursor, of course, is the little blinking line when you're typing text. Not to be confused with the pointer which is what you get when you use your trackpad or mouse to click on something. When you type new text, whether it is with the keyboard or with dictation, it's inserted at the location of the cursor. So it is important to be able to move the cursor around. You can do that with Voice Control using the Move command and then various modifiers. Move Left. Move left by five words. Move Up two lines. Move after brown fox. Move to beginning. Move to the end. So as you can see there's a lot of different ways to move the cursor around by word, by line, by sentence, by paragraph. You can use all sorts of different commands like that. One of the most common things you're going to say when doing dictation is Move to the End, because as you modify things and correct things and move around you're often going to be finished with your modifications and then want to continue with your document. So saying Move to the end is quite common. You're going to repeat that a lot. But also notice how I was able to say Move After or Move Before and then something that's in text and it will find that in the text and put the cursor there. That's usually the best way to move the cursor around. Look what happens if you say something and it is in the document more than once. You get to choose which one by speaking a number afterward. Move after document, 2.

Next let's talk about Selecting Text. When you're using a keyboard, trackpad, or mouse you're often selecting text to either delete it, replace it, copy and paste it and all of that. You can do the same using Voice Control. There are many different ways to do it and it's similar to cursor movement. Select the Previous Word. Select the Previous Three Words. Move Up Two Lines. Select this Paragraph. Select Temporary Document. So you can see how with selection you can just simply name the words that you want to select instead of having to move around and use specific commands, like previous three words or next five words, to get the selection right. Once you have a selection you can say Delete That or Copy That, or even Cut That to be able to perform an action on that. So, for instance, if I wanted to copy this and then go to the end of the document and paste a copy of it I can do it like this. Copy That. Move To The End. Paste That. 

So you may have notice that the word that plays an important part of using Voice Control Dictation. Once you have a selection you can issue various commands using the word that to effect what is selected. You can also, though, do those same commands usually by just mentioning the words. Like this. Replace temporary document with example document. There are a lot of commands that work like this. For instance, you can put quotes or parentheses around something or make it Bold. Put quotes around Temporary Document. Bold Temporary Document. You can even use words like before and after to insert text. Insert example before temporary document. Insert example after temporary document. 

Now the last thing I want to teach you is actually just one command. But it is very versatile. It's the Correct Command. You say Correct and either that, meaning the current selection, or Correct and then a group of words that's already there, it will come up with a list of choices of alternatives for that set of words. So you can use it to correct a mistake when dictation didn't understand you or even a mistake when you've said something but now you decided you want to change it. Correct quick brown fox. This comes in very useful in a variety of situations. So many times I hear people having trouble with dictation and not being able to get something that they want and all they need to do is use the Correct Command, and say correct that or correct and then those words and then they'll have all these different options that they can choose from and they can just speak that number and then get what they need. 

If you're going to learn anything from this tutorial learn to use that Correct Command. For instance, in that list of commands I showed you on the webpage before you should be able to say the phrase roman numeral and then a number and it should type out roman numerals. But it doesn't work. However, you can use Correct that to get around it. So watch this series of commands. Roman numeral 23. Correct that. 3. Uppercase that. So you can see there that I used a series of commands to get what I want fairly quickly. The key was using Correct That to start with to get a little bit closer. Then I was able to use other commands to get it to appear just like I wanted to. 

Here's some quick tips to take you a little bit further. If you go back into Voice Control here and look where it says Command you've also got Vocabulary right next to it. You can add your own words to this. So if there are special words or names or locations, all sorts of things, you can just add them here and it will recognize those and spell them correctly. Also realize that the Command Undo works with Dictation just like it does if you're using your keyboard. You'll use this a lot as well. So, for instance, I'll type something here and say I'll just decide I don't want to keep it. This is the next sentence period. Undo That. You can do multiple Undo That and you can also use Redo That as well. 

Also note that you can combine Voice Control Dictation and typing at the same time. Voice Control doesn't turn Off your keyboard. So if you're able to type you can combine it. Typing something and then speaking other things or use your keyboard and your mouse and your trackpad to make corrections and changes and move the cursor around if you're more comfortable with that. But then for actually typing long passages use Voice Control. You don't have to turn off Voice Control. You can just leave it on, speak, and type. 

There's also a Spelling Mode if you need to spell something that you know it is not going to get correct. You just say, Spelling Mode, to go into the Spelling Mode and then Dictation Mode to go back into Dictation Mode. Spelling Mode capital Cheesman. Dictation Mode, Park. 

So if you really want to master Voice Control Dictation on your Mac my recommendation is to learn those five different skills and stick with those. Use the keyboard to make any other changes that you need to and try not to get frustrated when things don't work right. Once you get the hang of using all those different commands then occasionally look for new commands in the list in System Settings and add those to your Dictation vocabulary. Remember it's not going to be perfect. But neither is typing on the keyboard. You occasionally mistype, get words wrong, and have to correct them there just like you will with Voice Control Dictation. So stay patient and persistent and you'll be rewarded in the end with being able to type very quickly and accurately using Voice Control Dictation on your Mac. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.