In the past I've talked about using dictation on your Mac.
It's fairly easy but you can make it much more powerful if you know the special dictation
commands that you can use.
So first let's turn it on.
I'm going to go to System Preferences and I've already got it turned on but I want to
show you how.
Under Keyboard, Dictation, and then I turn it On here and turned on Use Enhanced Dictation
and I've set the Language and I've set the Shortcut key to pressing the Fn key twice
which is the default.
So now I can startup Dictation really easily by pressing the Fn key twice and then talking.
Normally you would just leave this on and just keep talking and keep doing commands.
But in order to do the tutorial I'm going to have to turn it off so I can talk to you
without it dictating everything that I say.
So, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period.
So I tapped the Fn key a third time there at the end to turn it off.
But normally you would leave it on.
Now this works great.
Except what happens if it doesn't get it right or you want to make a change or something
like that.
You have to really stop dictating, go to the keyboard, use your trackpad and mouse to do
it.
Well, there's actually a whole bunch of commands that means you can be completely hands off
once you get good at them.
So to see these commands you can look at two places.
One place is System Preferences.
You can go to Accessibility and then click on Dictation and Dictation Commands.
Here's where you can search through them.
You can see different ones.
You can activate or deactivate them.
You can even add custom ones which I'm not going to go into here.
But this isn't the most convenient place to see them.
It's easier just to have Dictation show you.
So I'm going to turn it back on.
Show Commands.
So you can see that brought up that little list there.
That little list, which we're going to look at again in a second, will allow you to not
only see all the commands but just the commands that will actually work in this situation.
So it's really handy.
For instance, let's say we want to type some more text but maybe we say something wrong
and we just want to undo it.
You would use the Undo That command.
Here's another sentence that I want to type.
Undo That.
So you can see at the very top of the little microphone floating icon there you saw the
words Undo That appear meaning that it took that as a command and got rid of what I just
said.
So that's really handy because a lot of times when you're dictating something you put out
a thought, it types it, and then you realize no, I want to say it a different way.
The easiest way to actually do that is just to get rid of the entire thing and to say
it again.
It's easy to speak a sentence so why bother with lots of commands to move the cursor around
and select a word and change the word and all of that when you can just speak the sentence
again.
So that's probably the most important one.
But you can also use a series of commands to actually move the cursor around and select
text.
Watch the list of commands change in different situations.
Here is another sentence that I want to type.
Move left.
Select previous word.
Something else.
Select sentence.
Move right.
Replace something with anything.
So you can see there's a bunch of different things that you can do there.
You can use move left, move right, move up, move down and all of that to move the cursor
around.
You can use the word select with various things like sentence, paragraph.
You can say select previous sentence.
That kind of thing.
There's all sorts of things.
It takes a lot of practice to get used to it.
So if you want to use this what I suggest doing is perhaps just learning them one at
a time and adding them to your workflow.
So I've actually switched the microphone that Dictation uses to a microphone that I have
that uses a mute button.
So now we can enable this and it's not going to hear anything I say because the other microphone
is muted.
So now we can look through this text here and you can see all the different commands
here.
So there's a lot here under Selection for selecting things.
There's also a lot here under Navigation that you can use like Go to beginning, Go to end,
Move left, Move right.
Things like that.
Then under Editing there's a ton of stuff.
You saw me use the Replace command.
You can also use Cut, Copy, and Paste with the word That after it.
You can use Capitalize, lower case, all sorts of things.
Here's a really important one.
The word Literal and something after it.
So say you want to actually type the words Move Right.
Well, it's going to interpret that as a command to move the cursor right.
But if you say Literal Move Right it will actually put the words Move Right there.
That's really handy.
There's some formatting things here for, you know, Bold, Italics, Underline.
That kind of thing.
You can even Start Dictation, Stop Dictation using your voice.
Stop Dictation, of course, being the most useful because you can turn this off even
if you're activating Dictation with the keyboard.
Show Commands is what I used to bring up this list of commands here.
So you've got that.
Then you've got a variety of other things that aren't really dictation commands but
more just general commands for voice control of your computer.
So there's a bunch of different things.
One I want to leave you with is something that gives you a ton of control over what
you can do.
The way you do that is you basically use Show Numbers and then Choose Number.
So let's say I want to change the font style.
So I can do that using the Tool Bar but how do I do that with Dictation.
So I'm going to select everything and then I'm going to use Show Numbers and Choose Number
to change the font style.
Select All.
Show Numbers.
Choose 7.
Choose 5.
Now you can use the same thing to do anything in the Menu.
Click Format Menu.
Choose 2.