Mavericks Dictation vs. Dragon Dictate: How good is OS X's built-in tool?
One of the features in OS X Mavericks that I was most looking forward to was offline dictation.
Back in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple added the systemwide Dictation tool, similar to Siri in iOS. 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. 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.
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. If something went wrong, you had no idea until you were (a) done speaking and (b) OS X had finished transcribing what you said.
If something went wrong, you had no idea until you were (a) done speaking and (b) OS X had finished transcribing what you said.
OS X transcription 2.0
That’s no longer the case. In OS X Mavericks, you now have the option of downloading a file that supports offline dictation. To set it up, you go to the Dictation & Speech pane in System Preferences and tick the Use Enhanced Dictation box. That causes the file to download. (Note: It’s a big one—785MB.)
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