Once again, I am in a place where I can’t work directly with my servers to test the NetInstall steps and images, so... we’ll take a brief detour here to take a quick look at your Mac’s built-in dictation features.

Are there any text-to-speech products for Mac OS X which have a speech quality that rivals IVONA's speech synthesis quality? Is by far the most accurate. While the built-in dictation in Mac OS X is good, it doesn't learn when you correct it. Dragon Dictate gets better the more you use it, allowing you to achieve 99.9% accuracy (that's one. Now compare that to what it took in Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Windows Speech Recognition. Dragon NaturallySpeaking: Dictating the 314 utterances with DNS, I finished the draft in 159 seconds, for a rate of 126 words per minute. Dragon Professional Individual 15 is the most accurate, sophisticated and powerful speech recognition software in the world. Dragon N aturallySpeaking 15 uses Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence to generate the text almost as quickly as you can speak. You will see a message warning you that using your Mac’s dictation option the way it’s currently set up will send your spoken text to Apple to be converted. Click Enable Dictation.

I can hear you now

You may think you have to wait for Siri to appear in macOS Sierra before you can talk to your Mac, but your Mac already has a way to listen to everything you say and to turn what it hears into text. You can enable this feature, which supports over 30 languages and many more dialects, using the Dictation & Speech preference in System Preferences.

Apple’s speech to text features are turned off by default, so before you can use this feature you need to turn it on.

Open System Preferences.
Click Dictation & Speech, which you’ll find in the middle of System Preferences’ fourth row.
Click the radio button that says On. You will see a message warning you that using your Mac’s dictation option the way it’s currently set up will send your spoken text to Apple to be converted.
Click Enable Dictation. The default keyboard shortcut to begin dictating is to press your Mac’s fn key twice. If you aren’t using an Apple keyboard with an f* key, make note of or choose a different shortcut key.

Let’s give this a test:

Open the TextEdit app.
Select File > New to create a new document.
Tap the fn (or your selected shortcut key) twice and began speaking to your Mac.

Note that what you say will almost immediately begin to appear on your screen. You should also note that your normal speech doesn’t make for very good text, because your normal speech doesn’t usually include punctuation. So, let’s work out a little “speech-to-text”.

Learning to speak again

Instead of your normal speech, speak the following italicized text exactly as it’s written, but first, press the fn key twice:

This is great

Exclamation point

I’m using Apple’s speech to text feature

Period

New paragraph

Pretty great

Comma

Isn’t it

Question mark

Mac Text To Speech Online

When you’re done, press the fn key.

As you can see, this isn’t exactly pretty sounding speech, but, as you can also see, what you said is exactly what appears on the page. And that’s pretty great!

So, about that warning

By default, Apple’s dictation feature uses Apple’s servers to convert your speech to text. This can be a problem, because whatever you’re saying gets sent across the Internet, converted to text, and sent back to you; and if you don’t have access to the Internet you can’t use this feature. So let’s remedy that:

Open System Preferences.
Click Dictation & Speech.
Put a check in the box that says Use Enhanced Dictation.

You Mac will download the speech-to-text translation files to your Mac’s hard drive. As soon as the download is complete you’ll have access to the dictation feature without an Internet connection and you don’t have to worry about your romantic love poetry traveling to infinity and beyond to get turned into text.

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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.)

Having this transcription-support file on your Mac dramatically improves the functionality of OS X’s built-in Dictation feature. Now, when you press the Fn key twice and start speaking, the words appear on screen as you speak. The feature works anywhere on the Mac that you can enter text, no training or customization necessary. Just press the key and start talking. In fact, it’s how I’m adding this very text.

Overall, I really like the feature. With my Retina MacBook Pro, the two microphones are so good that I can even dictate without first donning a headset microphone (a traditional requirement for dictation). I find myself using it throughout the operating system and in places that I’d never thought of using dictation before, including online forms and annotations to PDF files. It’s great.

But Mac dictation isn’t new to Mavericks. I’ve been dictating to computers for a long time. (When I first started dictating, you … had … to … talk … like … this … leaving … a … space … between … each … word.) My usual tool is Dragon Dictate for Mac. So when I heard that Apple was improving the Dictation tool in OS X, my first question was: How will it compare to Dragon?

When I heard that Apple was improving the Dictation tool in OS X, my first question was: How will it compare to Dragon?

(Note that, while Apple has never stated publicly where it got the technology behind Siri dictation, I strongly suspect it is Nuance, the same company that publishes Dragon Dictate.)

And so I decided to put the two dictation systems to the test. I took a single passage of text and read it aloud to my Mac, first using Mavericks’s built-in Dictation tool and then using Dragon’s. The differences were striking.

Free Text To Speech Download

Putting them to the test

Just using the two products is a different experience. Dictation software doesn’t understand speech the same way humans do. We continually and instantaneously parse the words we hear based on context; that’s how we know the difference between “ice cream” and “I scream.” Computers do much the same thing, but they aren’t as good at it.

What this means is that, in Mavericks’s Dictation system, words appear on the screen as I speak them, but in a disjointed way, as the system tries to figure out what I’m saying. The words themselves and their order change as I get deeper into a sentence; things keep switching around. Sometimes the screen gets so jumpy that it’s distracting. Dragon Dictate doesn’t put words on the screen as fast as Mavericks’s Dictation, but the words it does put up are usually closer to the final transcription than in Dictation.

The real test, however, is accuracy. To assess that, I used both the Mavericks Dictation tool and Dragon Dictate to transcribe a four-paragraph, 268-word passage of text. I ran through the passage three times in Mavericks, to iron out some kinks, and just once in Dragon Dictate. I didn’t use my existing user profile in Dragon Dictate, in an attempt to ma

Speech To Text For Mac Dragon