Having this transcription-support file on your Mac dramatically improves the functionality of OS X’s built-in Dictation feature. To set it up, you go to the Dictation & Speech pane in System Preferences and tick the Use Enhanced Dictation box. In OS X Mavericks, you now have the option of downloading a file that supports offline dictation. If something went wrong, you had no idea until you were (a) done speaking and (b) OS X had finished transcribing what you said. My biggest complaint about this implementation was that it didn’t give you any feedback about your dictation until your transcribed text returned to your Mac. But this feature required an Internet connection and worked for only brief periods of time-about 30 seconds-before your Mac stopped listening to your speech and headed off to Apple’s servers to have your words transcribed. You pressed a key combination (by default, the Fn key twice) and started talking to your Mac, and it recorded and transcribed what you said.
One of the features in OS X Mavericks that I was most looking forward to was offline dictation.īack in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple added the systemwide Dictation tool, similar to Siri in iOS.
