The microphone built-into your MacBook laptop, iMac or Apple Cinema Display may seem 'good enough' for casual dictation and voice command uses. A slight tweak up or downwards might improve your voice recognition accuracy significantly. In OSX's System Preferences > Sound pane, adjust the sound input level slider as you speak both softly and deliberately loudly to find the optimal setting. If you're serious about fully using voice features of your Macintosh - enable Enhanced Mode in System Preferences > Dictation & Speech pref pane.Īny time you're using speech recognition on a Mac, taking a moment to verify and adjust your headset or standalone microphone input levels is wise.

And, it supports additional Character and Formatting commands. It allows CONTINUOUS dictation without restrictions or delays. Once you've done this, you can use dictation offline anywhere at anytime without an internet connection. It understands common punctuation and 'new line' to advance the cursor to a new paragraph - but not much more.ĮNHANCED MODE requires you checkbox it as an option and downloads an 800MB file onto your Mac. Here we provide a few Apple dictation tips, suggestions and insights to get the time-saving and typing-saving results you hope for.Īpple provides TWO methods of Mac speech to text translation: BASIC MODE requires a live internet connection to capture short snippets of your voice recording, send it to Apple's servers for translation, then return it to your application window after a delay of a few seconds. How To Improve Dictation On Mac Optimizing Your OSX Voice Recognition Session There's a few things you can do to make sure your Mac OSX dictation experience is optimal.

Voice dictation macbook