Speak to Your Apple Mac: Enable Dictation in OS X

I recently purchased an Apple iMac for my professional use at home. A dedicated PC user for my entire adult life, I finally tired of battling frequent viruses, blue screens, hardware and software glitches, and a once superb Dell Support program that is sadly in decline in terms of customer service. 

I am extremely pleased with my iMac so far, but as a novice Mac user I go through daily learning experiences trying to figure out the differences between my old PC and new Mac. It's been fun, though, discovering the seemingly endless array of tools, apps, widgets, and resources -- some that are hard to find.

Each Thursday is a special training day for me. My Thursday edition of The New York Times arrives with its weekly "Personal Tech" section. Reading today's "Gadget Wise" column, I learned about the Dictation tool that comes standard with Apple's OS X Mountain Lion operating system. Unfortunately, the factory-installed system comes with Dictation disabled. So, if you know that it even exists and where to find it you have to enable it. 

Follow these simple steps on your OS X Mac and you, too, can talk to your Mac: speak instead of type characters, numbers, words, sentences, paragraphs, and even entire pages of text into Word, Mail, Messages, search and text boxes on Web sites, etc. Your words magically appear, right where you want them!

1. Click the Apple icon  in the upper-right corner of the tool bar at the top of your screen.

2. Click System Preferences.

3. On the System Preferences display, click Dictation and Speech, under System (fourth row of icons).

4. Toggle from the Off to the On radio button next to Dictation.

NOTE: You can also select Edit on the toolbar of any application you have running and click Start Dictation. See the image below.

Now that you have enabled dictation you are ready to talk to your Mac. Simply place your cursor in the desired text box or page location on your screen and double-click the Function button (fn) on your keyboard. The dictation icon will appear and start to record sound. Speak into your Mac's microphone and, when finished, click the Done button on the Dictation icon.

I hope this helps. Have fun conversing with your Mac! For more help with Dictation, go to Apple's Support site for Mac Basics: Dictation.

Mark

P.S. I used Dictation on my Mac to insert the last three paragraphs of this post. Neat stuff!