Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can almost completely control
your Mac with your voice in macOS Catalina. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great
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Apple completely revamped voice control in macOS Catalina. It added a ton of functionality
to it. Plus it works really smoothly now. Let me show you how you can enable voice control
and basically do almost anything that you do with the mouse and keyboard but only using
your voice.
To turn on Voice Control go to System Preferences, then Accessibility, and then scroll down and
look for Voice Control. Here you've got the enable Voice Control checkbox. Before you
do that check the language to the one you are using and your Microphone, if you have
multiple microphones. You can also choose whether or not a sound plays when it recognizes
a command. The click Commands and you'll see a list of commands. You can actually click
on one of them and see variations as well.
We're going to move this over to the side here so we can refer to it as we go through.
Let's turn on Voice Control and it will take a few seconds to get going. Once it's on you've
got this little control here. You can move this box around to wherever you want. It's
either going to say Sleep or Wake Up. So you can click that to put it to sleep or click
it to get it to wakeup if it's already asleep. I'm going to put it to sleep a lot so I can
talk to you without it misinterpreting what I'm saying as a command.
So let's take a look at the Commands here and we can see one of the most basic one is
to simply open up an Application. We can do that by saying Open and the Application name.
(Open TextEdit) Now to click a button on the screen, like we want to hit this New Document
button, you just say Click and the name of the button. (Click New Document) Now we can
do a lot of other things with an application when it's opened. We can Hide it by saying
Hide Application. We can Quit it by saying Quit Application. Or if the application is
one we're not currently using, like it's running in the background, we can say Hide and the
application name or Quit and the application name. You can also say Save Document and Close
Window. Open Document is a shortcut to getting to what most apps have which is File Open.
Now you're also in Dictation mode when you have Voice Control on. So anything that is
not a Command is going to be typed. So we can type here in this TextEdit document pretty
easily. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.) Now there are a ton of ways to
edit what you're typing. I'm not going to get into those here. I'm going to stick to
controlling your Mac rather than dictation. But if you want you can look through Dictation
here and see there are different things you can say. There's different things for text
selection and editing your text as well. Even moving the cursor around inside of the text.
Now if you want to control anything that's in the Menus all you need to do is say Click
and then the name of the menu and then the word Menu. Once you're in the Menu you can
say Click and the name of the item. (Click Format Menu) (Click Make Rich Text) Notice
there how there were numbers as well. So I could have said the number instead of the
name of the item.
What about Buttons? Like you have these toolbar buttons here. So if I want to control the
font I'm going to have to use the name of this button. The name right now is Helvetica.
So I'm going to need to say that. (Click Helvetica, one) Now what about something that doesn't
have a name. Like here's the Color button. If I click that I can choose one of these
colors. But what do I even call these? Well, there's a way to click anywhere you want on
the screen using Grids. You can find the grids by going down to Overlays and Mouse. You can
do Show Grid or Show Window Grid and then you can Hide Grid or Choose a number or just
say the number. You can also say Click and then the number.
Let me show you how it works. (Show Grid, 2, 10) (Click 16) (Show Grid, 2, 19) (Click
14) You can keep digging down to the pixel level. Using Show Window Grid will show you
a grid just over the current window rather than the entire screen. Now you can also say
Show Numbers to select things. (Show Numbers, Click 7, Show Numbers, 15, 4) Show Numbers
brings up virtually anything that's on the screen. Between Show Grid and Show Numbers
you can click just about anywhere pretty quickly. Note that you can also say Double Click, Triple
Click, Long Press and even Click and Hold.
There's even a way to select or drag objects using this although it's really tricky. You
have to use a combination of these commands. It takes some practice and it doesn't always
work. So let's look at a practical example. Let's create a Pages document, add some text
to it, and Save it. Quit TextEdit, Open Pages, Click New Document,
Click Blank, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Save document. My test document.
Show Numbers, 6, 5. Click Save, Show Numbers, 1. Quit Pages.
How about sending an email? Open Mail. Show Numbers, 5. Mark Davidson. Press Return. Show
Numbers, 27. This is a Test. Show Numbers, 30. Hello Mark exclamation point. Show Numbers,
4. Quit Mail
You can also browse the web pretty easily. Open Safari. Wikipedia.org. Press return.
The War of 1812. Press Return. Scroll down. Move down. Show Numbers, 72. Show Numbers,
49. Show Numbers, 15. Click Bookmark's Menu, 5. Click Add. Quit Safari.
Now it's definitely far from perfect. Dictation takes practice and you always have to make
corrections. I find it works best when you can use the keyboard at the same time as you're
dictating to correct some things. Sometimes the commands don't quite work. Sometimes you
ask for it to show menus and it doesn't. Sometimes you ask for it to show grid and it doesn't.
Now, of course, there are those who need this functionality to use their Macs. But even
if you don't need Voice Control sometimes it's nice to basically sit back and give your
fingers a rest and browse the web or catch up on your correspondence just by using your
voice.