But it’s designed to learn the characteristics of your voice and vocabulary, so the recognition improves considerably once you start using the feature regularly. Chances are, you won’t get perfect accuracy the first time you use voice dictation Macs provide. To understand how to voice type on Mac, let’s first look at the process: when you speak into your Mac’s mic, your voice gets recorded and sent to Apple to be converted to text.

It’s just a great accessibility feature to know how to use.

It gives you a chance to formulate your ideas while talking through them, which is sometimes easier than writing.

It lets you multitask: use speech-to-text Mac to write up emails or chat messages hands-free.

It saves time: dictation can be twice as fast as typing.

How tempting is it to just talk at your computer and have it type what you say for you? If you’ve never tried writing documents with voice, this might be a good time to learn how to use mic to type on Mac for a number of reasons: And unlike Siri, Dictation Commands “know” about your documents, files, windows, calendars, and the items you have selected, and can control the applications you use to assist you with the tasks you want to perform.Tackle your tasks with Setapp app suite solutions. However, Siri’s awareness and control of your actual computer environment is limited to rudimentary things like performing searches and opening folders.ĭictation Commands are “local,” meaning that no internet connection or communication is required, everything you need for them to work is on your computer.

Siri is very good at those type of tasks. Generally, Siri functions as a virtual assistant performing secretarial duties, such as setting reminders, making appointments, looking up places, and gathering information from outside of your computer.

That is why your computer must be connected to the internet in order for Siri to work. Your interactions with Siri in macOS are actually communications with Apple’s computers over the internet. Siri in macOS is based upon an entirely different set of technologies than Dictation Commands, and offers very different functionality and abilities. You might be asking yourself “Are Dictation Commands the same as Siri in macOS?” and “Doesn’t Siri in macOS do the same kind of things?”

Dictation mac os