Mavericks Dictation would be to be very painful to use as a long term solution because there is no way of correcting mistakes and therefore helping it to learn. If correction arrives in the next version of OS X, it will be a game changer.

The only thing lacking from the built in Mavericks dictation is correction. Despite this understated introduction, I think it’s one of the best things about OS X Mavericks. You need to turn it on by enabling a mode called ‘Enhanced Dictation’ in the System Preferences. In fact it almost comes as a hidden feature. In OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), for the first time, there is a usable speech recognition engine built-in to Mac OS X. In OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Apple introduced “dictation.” It was basically an OS X version of ‘SIRI’ where your speech would be sent off to a server to be recognised and the text would come back to your computer. There was also ‘Speakable Items’ where you could dictate short commands to the Mac. These were attempts to make the Macintosh computer human. Then in the 1990’s we had ‘Plaintalk’ and ‘Macintalk’. It sure is great to get out of that bag.”

Steve Jobs said “today, for the first time ever, I’d like to let Macintosh speak for itself,” and the computer replies. You may remember the launch of the first Macintosh in 1984. Here’s how it compares to Dragon Naturally Speaking, and how to enable the ‘Enhanced Dictation’ Mode which makes it a lot faster. This is mainly due to the complete lack of any correction capability. The built-in Mavericks OS X speech recognition is a good piece of Voice recognition software to give you a taste of what speech recognition is like, but not as good as Dragon Dictate.

Enhanced dictation macbook