That’s sensible, of course, but it does mean that you have to touch your keyboard every time you want to dictate a new message. To start, you have to tap a microphone button on the keyboard (iOS) or press a key on the keyboard twice (Mac, set in System Preferences > Keyboard > Dictation) to initiate dictation. The big problem with dictation in iOS and macOS is that, when it makes mistakes, there’s no way to fix them. What’s Wrong and Right with iOS and macOS Dictation An amalgamation of the two technologies would be ideal. In many ways, VCD is better than the dictation built into iOS and macOS. With iOS 13 and Catalina, Apple significantly beefed up its voice control capabilities and simultaneously introduced what seems to be an entirely different dictation technology-call it “Voice Control dictation,” which I’ll abbreviate to VCD here.

MacOS has also had dictation features for years, but it has been even less successful and less commonly used than iOS’s feature, in part because it requires so much more setup than just tapping a button on a virtual keyboard. By the time you’ve edited your text onscreen, you may as well have typed it from scratch. Most frustrating is that you cannot fix mistakes with your voice while dictating, so you end up either having to put up with mistakes in your text or use clumsy iOS editing techniques.

More recently, we’ve become used to dictating short text messages using the dictation capabilities in iOS.ĭictation in iOS is far from perfect, but when the alternative is typing on a tiny virtual keyboard, even imperfect voice input is welcome. (And yes, I dictated the first draft of this article.) Dictation is a skill, but it’s one that many lawyers and executives of yesteryear managed to pick up. More interesting is dictation, where you craft text by speaking to your device rather than by typing on a keyboard. However, the simple fact is that modern-day computer interfaces are designed to be navigated and manipulated with a pointing device and a keyboard. The Mac has long had voice control, and the current incarnation in macOS 10.15 Catalina is pretty good for those who rely on it. The problem has always been that what we want to do with our computers doesn’t necessarily lend itself to voice interaction. Or, rather, we have mostly wanted to control our computers via voice-see episodes of Star Trek from the 1960s. Speech recognition has long been the holy grail of computer data input. How iOS and macOS Dictation Can Learn from Voice Control’s Dictation #1661: Mimestream app for Gmail, auto-post WordPress headlines to Twitter and Mastodon, My Photo Stream shutting down.#1662: New Macs, 12 top OS features for 2023, vertical tabs in Web browsers, watchOS 9.5.1.#1663: Exploring the Apple Vision Pro, 12 more OS features coming in 2023, new Apple service features, Apollo shuts down.#1664: Real system requirements for OS 2023, beware Siri creating alarms instead of timers.#1665: Important OS security updates, abusive Web notifications, solve myopia with an iPhone, Self Service Repair.

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