by Though not everyone cares to admit it, we all talk to our computers. Much of the time these conversations are quite short and comprised of ejaculations of joy or, when things aren’t going swimmingly, a grumbled #${813a954d5e225a1509f22204ece89c855080ce25555f20805f61bed63cbfde3b}&@!! Regardless of what you say to your Mac, it always responds in the same way—with stoney silence. But it needn’t.
And it needn’t because Mountain Lion includes a dictation feature that lets your computer transcribe your spoken words in an impressive way. And if you’d care to have your Mac do the talking, another speech feature allows it to read selected text back to you with one of a group of human-sounding voices. The power to do each is found in the Dictation & Speech system preference.
Dictation
Given how capable dictation can be, you’d think that the Dictation pane would be full of arcane settings and demands that you spend an hour training the Mac to understand you. But no, it’s very straightforward. You have the options to turn Dictation on or off, select a keyboard shortcut to engage dictation, choose the language you’ll be speaking, and select an audio source (which, if your Mac comes equipped with a microphone, is the internal mic).
You’ll also see an About Dictation and Privacy button at the bottom of this pane. When you click it you’ll learn something of how this technology works. I’ll save you the trip by explaining that when you use dictation, the words you say are sent to Apple’s servers where some powerful technology is applied to the job of quickly turning those words into text (so yes, your Mac needs to be connected to the Internet for this to work). When you finish speaking, your words appear within the application in which you initiated the dictation command. Apple keeps a copy of your words to help improve dictation’s performance. If you’re uncomfortable with that, simply turn off dictation in this preference. When you do, your stored data and words will be deleted from Apple’s servers.
The few controls found in the Dictation preference
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