How to Enable and Use Dictation in Mac OS X Mountain Lion
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Posted March 9, 2013 at 9:37pm by iClarified
These are instructions on how to enable and use Dictation in Mac OS X Mountain Lion.
Step One Select System Preferences from the Apple Menu at the top left of your screen.
Step Two Click to select Dictation & Speech from the System Preferences menu.
Step Three Click to choose the Dictation tab from the Dictation & Speech menu.
Step Four Turn on Dictation by selecting the On radio button.
You'll be notified that when you dictate text what you say along with other information such as your contacts is sent to Apple. Click the Enable Dictation button to continue.
Step Five Choose your audio input device from the dropdown located below the microphone icon. In this example we will use the MacBook Pro's internal microphone.
Step Six Select a preferred shortcut that will be used to start a dictation from the Shortcut dropdown. In this example we will leave the shortcut as 'Press Fn (Function) Key Twice'.
Step Seven Select your preferred language for dictation from the Language dropdown. Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish are supported.
USING DICTATION: Navigate to the place where you'd like to dictate text and press the Fn key twice. Notice a microphone icon will appear. As you speak a purple audio level indicator will be displayed inside the icon. No text will appear while you are dictating. You may speak continuously for up to 30 seconds at a time.
When you have finished dictating, click the Done button below the microphone icon or press the Fn key. Your text will be uploaded to Apple for processing.
Once processed the microphone icon will disappear and your dictation will appear as text.
SHORTCUTS: There are numerous shortcuts available to help improve your dictations. Some basic ones include 'all caps', 'new paragraph', 'new line', 'period', 'comma', 'question mark', 'quote', and 'end-quote'.
@pugman: Data mining techniques will allow fast efficient automated searches for specific items of interest. What proof does anyone have that the archives are actually anonomized? Haven't Google and Apple already been exposed of capturing and archiving more than they claim to? And that's just what we know about.
You are naive if you don't think the government won't be requesting copies from Apple (or intercepting them en route for its Total Information Awareness program). It's pretty clear by now that if your information is stored on ANY corporation's severs, it WILL be given up. Finally, regardless of the institution, there is always the potential for rogue and malicious employees to misuse the information they have access to. It's one thing to give up privacy when it is required to perform a useful function, but I just don't see the necessity of having translation take place in the cloud. Text to speech has been done locally for years.
Let Apple make cloud translation an option, so that YOU and others who don't seem to care, can be the guinea pigs that allow their communications to be monitored. Let the rest of us continue to have some vestige of privacy.
I object to having my address book and every single dictated utterance sent over the internet to Apple for processing (and archiving).
There is no good reason that speech to text can't be done locally. This outrageous invasion of privacy is also a problem with SIri on iOS.
Apple claims that by collecting everyone's dictation input, it will help them improve their algorithms. This is undoubtedly true, but at the cost of my privacy, it bothers me. There is no way to opt out other than to refuse to use this feature altogether.
I'm surprised that there is less public outcry over this. Are people just ignorant, or have we simply given up on the idea of privacy altogether?
I also object to Apple taking user data. There is concern about Apple's handling of privacy. I think Apple has failed to respect consumers and take this issue seriously. Once it starts to impact on sales - Apple may suddenly have a wake up call but if the company continues in this way.
I will stop buying if this continues. Apple may as well be just another Microsoft. I will wait for a small outfit to offer me respect as a creative person and consumer. After all that is the alternative Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs offered me all those years ago. I took it because I shared their values not sure what I am buying into now.