- Apple has made subtle improvements to dictation in macOS Sonoma that can make a big difference.
- Users can now dictate and type at the same time, allowing for corrections to be made without turning off dictation.
- Follow a few steps to enable dictation and make the most of its features.
Apple has not made giant changes to dictation in macOS Sonoma, but yet again the small improvements it has introduced will significantly help users. Here’s what’s new in Dictation and how to make the most of it.
Apple includes its improvements to dictation as one of the key benefits of upgrading to macOS Sonoma, but it’s one that you can easily miss. That’s because on the surface, dictation appears to be exactly the same as before. It’s identical in how you turn on the feature, right down to the one toggle you need to click in System Settings. But what happens now when you click **Dictation** to on is subtly different.
With macOS Sonoma, you can dictate and type at the same time. That doesn’t sound different, and it also doesn’t sound especially useful. You’re not, for instance, going to be dictating one paragraph while you’re typing another below it, even if your mind could cope with that. However, you are going to be dictating, then spotting a dictation error or simply changing your mind about a sentence, and fixing it. You can now turn to the keyboard and type a correction, a new sentence, or anything you like — without turning off dictation. Now you can dictate something, make typing corrections, then sit back and carry on dictating.
Previously, you had to enable dictation, then for each time you wanted to dictate, call up the feature. It would then listen until the moment you touched the keyboard, like the way your car’s cruise control switches off when you touch the gas. So you would start dictation, stop it, then have to start it again. Dictation was therefore either a choppy kind of start/stop operation, or you would put up with mistakes until you’d dictated a lot of text and could go back over it.
In System Settings, you can decide what microphone the dictation engine should listen to and specify what language you want to be able to dictate into. You can also set whether dictated text will automatically be punctuated or not, and you can set up how to invoke dictation. Apple also says that macOS Sonoma’s Dictation benefits from “accuracy improvements through next-level speech recognition,” making it more likely to correctly transcribe what you’re saying.
Overall, Apple is making Dictation better and easier to use with its small improvements. Follow the steps above to enable dictation and make the most of its features.
