OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Using Speech to Command the Mac

OS X has built-in speech-recognition capabilities. As Chapter 2 explains, it can take dictation and transcribe what you say if you enable dictation in the Dictation & Speech system preference—a new capability in OS X Mountain Lion.

New Feature

The Dictation & Speech system preference had been called the Speech system preference in previous versions of OS X, and it used to have the Speech Recognition pane to use speech recognition for a different purpose: acting on spoken commands, such as for those with motor disabilities. Those controls now reside in the Accessibility system preference's Speakable Items pane.

Speech recognition in OS X is designed to recognize hundreds of commonly spoken commands. You can use it to control the interface, switch between applications, and even start Messages conversations.

Using a microphone

Speech recognition requires a microphone. Fortunately, most Mac users are in luck because most Macs have a built-in microphone. (It accompanies the built-in iSight camera, usually located just above the screen.)

The built-in microphones in MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and iMacs, as well as in most of the Cinema Display and Thunderbolt Display flat-panel monitors made by Apple, are all high-quality affairs, and most of them work just fine for speech recognition.

Using a built-in microphone is fine for OS X's speech recognition, but if you find that you have difficulty with the built-in microphone, you might consider upgrading to a ...