Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Let's take a look at using Dictation in Mavericks.
To get started with Dictation the first thing you want to do is to go to System Preferences.
Then you want to go to Dictation & Speech and select Dictation.
Now you have several different options.
The main one, of course, is whether or not to turn Dictation on or off.
But just as important as that is whether or not to Use Enhanced Dictation.
Now, if you don't have that checked off that means that basically you speak short verse
of text, I think you have about thirty seconds to speak, and that is sent to Apple servers.
Probably the same servers that handle Siri.
Then that is returned to you as text.
So you need a constant internet connection and you can only speak in short bits.
Then those are translated and returned to you.
And it works fine.
It doesn't take up any space on your drive.
But if you turn this on you have to do this large download.
But once you do that it is done and then you have Use Enhanced Dictation which is done
all locally and it works out much better.
Also notice here you can set the microphone and you can set the language.
You can add additional languages.
Then you can change the Shortcut key.
I'm going to keep it at the default here which is Press Fn key twice.
So now let's go into TextEdit and give it a try.
I'm going to speak some text after pressing the Fn key twice.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period.
You can see I hit Fn once and it was the same a pressing the Done button there.
So I can basically hover my finger over the Fn key on my keyboard and use it that way.
Notice how it actually did all that.
Not only was it doing it in real time but it was kind of adjusting things based on what
I said.
So as it kind of got the next word and the word after that it might go back and correct
a previous word that made more sense.
Now it is not magic.
It doesn't do everything quite right.
You can see if I just talked normally it is going to get a few things wrong but it is
generally going to do a good job.
What really shines is if you both type and speak at the same time, because it is real
time, you can kind of interact with your words.
So let's give this a try.
I'm going to try speaking and typing at the same time.
Like I added that period there by typing
and I just made those corrections period.
So it makes ideal for doing messages.
Like you can just use it here inside of Mail.
You can use Dictation anywhere that the text cursor appears.
So I'm going to use the Fn key twice here and start dictating a message.
To Whom It May Concern I received the shipment of penguins comma but one of them was damaged
period.
Please send a replacement period.
Thanks period.
So you may have noticed that I can speak things like comma and period and it understands those
are punctuation.
There is a whole list of different things that you can say.
For instance, open parenthesis this close parenthesis.
It figures it out.
You can do some interesting things like some symbols.
Dollar sign fifty.
Smiley face.
There is an entire list of all the different commands if you go to this page here at the
Apple website.
Scroll down and you will find a detailed list of commands here.
You can see there is all sorts of different things that you can do.