How To Use Dictation on Your Mac

There are two separate type of dictation you can use on your Mac. Basic keyboard dictation lets you easily combine talking and typing. Voice Control adds a powerful list of commands and lets you control almost every aspect of your Mac.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use dictation on your Mac.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now if your typing skills are lacking you may be looking for a faster way to enter text. The Mac has two different ways for you to dictate text to it instead of typing. One method is found in Keyboard Settings. You use this if you can type, but you just want to use dictation so you can enter text faster. Another method is found in Accessibility Settings. This method is designed for people that can't or have difficulty in using a keyboard. 
So first let's look at basic dictation. Turn that On, go to System Settings and then look for Keyboard on the left. Scroll down in Keyboard until you get Dictation. Here you can turn it On of Off. You also have some other options. For instance, you can set the language that you can use for dictation. Dictation is only available in a selection of languages. But you can select more than one. Then you can set the shortcut for starting dictation. Now on most newer Macs the default is going to be to use the Microphone Key which is usually F5 on your keyboard. On older Macs you may not have a microphone printed on that key but it is not going to be an option. I'm using Press Control Key twice. But you can choose one of the other ones. You can also customize at Custom Keyboard Shortcut. So, I could for instance just add F5 as my custom keyboard shortcut to make my older keyboard work like the newer one. 
You also have the choice of whether to turn on Auto-Punctuation. So this will attempt to add things like periods and commas when you talk without you actually having to say those words. So now let's look at how this works.
I'm going to use the Mail App as an example. But you be typing in any app. For instance, Pages or TextEdit, or the Messages App. I'm going to trigger dictation by pressing the Control Key twice pretty quickly and then I'm just going to talk.("For the best online security always use strong unique passwords that are randomly generated by a password manager"). So you can see here in macOS Sonoma things look a little different that they has in the past. You get that little microphone icon. That indicates that you're in Dictation Mode. Now it works very quickly if you've got a Mac that is using the M1 processor or newer because all this dictation processing takes place on your Mac. If you're using an older Intel Mac then the audio is actually being sent over the internet to Apple servers. The translation from audio to text is taking place there and it's being sent back to your Mac. So there is going to be a little bit of a delay if you are using an older Mac.
Notice here it did insert two different commas. So, it is using the auto-punctation there. You could always add your own punctation. For instance if I wanted to put a period under this ............period. So you can see how it took the word first and then realized that should probably be that that should be the punctuation mark and changed it. 
Another great feature of dictation on the Mac is the ability to quickly switch from speaking to typing without having to actually turn off dictation. So here I'm actually going to speak but then I'm going to type out a bit of it and then continue speaking. 
                        Password managers also protect you from             attacks period
Notice my keyboard shortcut to initiate dictation is to press the Control Key twice. But I only have to press it once to actually stop dictation.
Now the little microphone can do more than just be there as an indicator that dictation is turned on. If I go into System Settings and I add a new language, so I'll just add Canadian English here, then look what happens when I start using dictation. It will be more than just the microphone. It's going to show me the language as well. I can click it to change. 
Now there is some commands you can use when speaking using Standard Dictation. Let's take a look at those. We're going to go back into System Settings and then go to the keyboard section here and I'm going to click the Question Mark button here at the bottom. Then this will give you Help Information for the entire set of settings here. I'm going to go to Dictation and you can see here there is a link to Dictate Messages and Documents. So let's click on that and then you're going to see this document here that will give you a little bit information about how to turn On Dictation and dictate text. You can see here there are some Tips. Like, for instance, to type an emoji you can just say the name of the emoji as long as you know the official name and the word Emoji. You can also say Punctuation Marks, like you saw me say period. You can also say Exclamation Mark. You can say New Line which is like pressing Return or new paragraph which is pressing Return twice. 
But there is more than that. If you click on this Command's For Dictating Text here you can see a whole list. So here are all the Punctuation Marks you can speak. Here are some other special characters that you can speak as well. For Formatting there are some other things you can do like say the word Numeral to format the next phrase as a number. You can say New Paragraph as well. You can say Tab Key. You can turn capitalization On with Caps On/Caps Off. So on. There are some mathematical symbols that you can speak. There are some currency symbols and there are other things you can easily speak here as well. 
There are also some trouble shooting tips if you look at the bottom here. If Dictation on your Mac does't work look there and you have some things you can do if things aren't working right. In general when using Standard Dictation you don't really have the ability to correct things using your voice. The idea here is you'll dictate and if there are any questions that have made you're going to use the keyboard and mouse or trackpad to make those corrections. 
So let's look at the second way to do dictation on your Mac. That is to use the more powerful Voice Control feature. So this not only allows you to dictate text but to actually Command your Mac. Those commands include manipulating the Text Cursor and the text. So in some ways it is more comprehensive. Even if you have the ability to type on a keyboard sometimes you may want to actually use Voice Control if you really want to be hands-free for awhile. 
Let's go into System Settings and this we're going to go to Accessibility, right here. We're going to look for Voice Control. Here's where you turn Voice Control On. Once you do you're going to see it appear here in the Menu Bar at the top. You can click here and choose Stop Listening to kind of pause voice control. This is different that how it worked before macOs Sonoma where you actually had this little floating window with Start Listening and Stop Listening inside it. So here you do it in the Menu Bar now. If you have multiple languages setup here in Voice Control you can also switch between them right here and you can choose which microphone is used. 
So you've got all those things here. Hints sometimes come up mostly having to  do with Commands and not dictation. The way that Voice Control works is it basically is just always On unless you go up here to actually Stop Listening. So I'm going to go back here into Mail and I'm going to use this to dictate instead. I'll start with Start Listening and then Talk. You should also use two-factor authentication comma whoever it is available period. So you can see it isn't as smooth as using regular dictation. It is still taking place on your Mac but it is putting it together in groups of words. But the result is more or less the same. However, with Voice Control you've actually got a lot more that you can do.
So we're going to go back to Voice Control Settings here in System Settings. Then at the bottom you'll see Commands & Vocabulary. Vocabulary simply allows you to add special words to the list. Then if you've got special terminology or names or places or things like that, that it is not getting right, you can Add To List and it may do better. 
Also you've got Commands. So you go into Commands here and a lot of these commands have a lot to do with controlling your Mac. For instance to being able to Quit and application or Open a Document. Things like that. So Voice Control is doing all of that as well as listening to text and taking dictation. But if you scroll down in this list you're going to find a lot of these Commands have to do with dictation. We can find some things here like, for instance, there is Something and Emoji. So you can say like pizza emoji and it looks like that. You could also turn on Dictation Mode or set it to just Command Mode. So if you don't want it to take dictation you can kind of Stop it and it will command your Mac. You can just speak those phrases. Notice here how it gives very detailed descriptions of things. So if you're not sure of how something works just select it here in the List and then read about it and see the examples. 
Under Text Selection you can see there is a lot of things here that Voice Control does that regular dictation can't do. For instance you can Select Back to select the last thing that you said and even Select Previous or Select Next. Then you can say things like Select Word for a specific word. This makes it really easy to replace things. For instance, back here in Mail if I turn this back on, Select Whenever, Wherever. So you can see how easy it was for me to replace that word by using a couple of commands. So you have a lot of selection things here. I mean you could even get really specific, like selecting the previous five words for instance. You can even extend selections by Characters and Words. All sorts of things. This is really built for not being able to use the keyboard at all. You can even move the cursor with these Text Navigation Controls. So Move Left will move the text cursor left one. Just like pressing a left arrow key. Under Text Editing you're going to find things like Replace so you can replace a set of words with another set of words. Another way to correct text. You can insert something before or after. You can correct something. So if it doesn't get something right you can say, Correct that, and it will give you some suggestions as to what it thinks it may be. You should use two-factor too. Correct that, two. So you can see there how it got the word too wrong. I was able to say correct that and then choose the second one by just saying the number, also 2, to put the correct word there. 
You've got the ability to Undo and Redo. You can Cut, Copy, and Paste after selecting and capitalize things and lowercase things. You can see this is pretty powerful. So if you learn all of these you can really do almost anything that you could do with a keyboard using Voice Control Dictation. 
Then there is the ability to have your own custom commands. So I can hit the Plus button down here and I could have it setup to when I say, and then type something here, and the form, and there is a variety of things including pasting text. So there is a lot that you can do here with Custom Commands as well. Notice you can turn On or Off any of these. So if, for instance, you find one of them here is getting triggered by accident because you're saying something similar to it you can always just turn this Off if you don't really need that command .
So if you've never tried dictation before on your Mac, try the standard keyboard dictation first. Use that in conjunction with the keyboard. The goal there is simply to increase your text entry speed and using your voice and the keyboard together is probably the best way to do that. If you do need the accessibility feature of Voiceover though then you could do a lot of very powerful things using dictation as well as the Voiceover Commands. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “How To Use Dictation on Your Mac”

Sury

2 years ago

Very useful, Gary. Thank you very much..

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Arnie Keller

Do both systems of dictation use the same text engine? If they don’t, which is faster?

Gary Rosenzweig

Arnie: I haven't tested them for speed. Try it yourself as it may depends on your voice and also how you use dictation (with keyboard, lots of special commands, etc).

Ellen

I do like/use dictation. Since I upgraded my system dictation changed. When I used to say new line cursor would jump to a new line, but now dictation just shuts off and then when I turn it back on, it went to the new iine. Also I haven’t been able to figure out if I can just say space to go to the next space. Nothing works for that and I would like that. Maybe with a new computer things will change. I want simplicity and all you said was complicated for me with too many choices to figure out.

John Lake

1 year ago

Mac dictation command "numeral 7" types numeral 7, not just the 7, as the instructions suggest. Is there a way to fix this?

John: Using Keyboard dictation or Voice Control?

Peter Baker

Do you have a video which includes Google dictation software.

Peter: Yes. https://macmost.com/3-alternatives-to-using-macos-dictation.html

Khazar

10 months ago

What a great and interesting video! Thanks.

Linda

9 months ago

I've been using Voice Control on my Mac for over a year. I mostly use it for voice typing in documents and text fields.During that year, I've been trying to figure out why it works as expected for a while and then stops working, not inputting my speech at all. When I try to search for answers, the responses discuss dictation, the keyboard option, not the accessibility option, which is the one I need to use. How do I differentiate the two when searching for answers? Thank you.

Linda: There's no good answer to that because the results are only going to be as good as the content out there. If some question on Apple's forums says just "dictation" and doesn't differentiate, then search engines have no way of knowing. You'll just need to maybe use "Voice Control dictation" as your best bet.
As for your problem, I wonder if switching it quickly off and on fixes it? Or switching microphones back and forth does? Things like that.

Comments Closed.

How To Use Dictation on Your Mac

Comments: 12 Responses to “How To Use Dictation on Your Mac”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information