Hey Dora…

ByDon

So we have Siri and I’ve been playing around with Alexa (don’t tell Grace!) but now I have Dora, too. Dora is the computer from Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls which were some of my favorite Sci-Fi as a kid.

I was helping a customer that has pretty bad arthritis and struggled to use the keyboard. I was straightening out her email and getting her off of AOL (something we do often!) and noticed how difficult it was to type a simple email. So, I showed her dictation on the Mac and wow, it was like a light just got switched on. Dictation has come a long way and if your are on Mavericks, Yosemite or El Capitan, Apple’s enhanced dictation works wonderfully.

Dictation will not be a satisfying experience for you if you have a lot of noise in the room, i.e. other people talking, music, etc, but if you are working alone in a relatively quiet environment it can be a great tool not only for dictating that email but you can also use spoken commands to direct your Mac to take action.

Setting up Enhanced Dictation

  • Open System Preferences, then click on Dictation & Speech. Turn on Dictation and set up your options.
  • Click Use Enhanced Dictation. This will download a 1.2GB file so that you can dictate without internet connection.
  • Choose your language and dialect. Some languages, such as English, have multiple dialects.
  • Choose the keyboard shortcut you will use to signal that you’re ready to start dictating. The default is pressing the function Fn key twice, which I find convenient but you can customize it.
  • Choose your preferred microphone from the pop-up menu below the microphone icon. Normally, you use the internal microphone but if you are using a headset or external microphone you can choose that.

Using Dictation

  • Go to a document or other text field and place the insertion point where you want your dictated text to appear.
  • Press the keyboard shortcut for starting dictation. The default shortcut is Fn Fn (press the Fn key twice). Or choose Edit > Start Dictation. When your Mac is listening, it displays a microphone with an input meter that rises and falls as you speak.
  • Speak the words that you want your Mac to type. Use dictation commands to add punctuation, formatting, and more.
  • To stop dictating, click Done below the microphone icon, or press Fn, or switch to another window.

The more you use Dictation, the better it understands you. Dictation learns the characteristics of your voice and adapts to your accent.

I will go into some of the more enhanced features like Dictation Commands in next week’s Kibbles & Bytes but I can tell Dora to Open an App, select text, move up or down and much more. I think you will like dictation on the Mac, give it a try!

Similar Posts

  • Apple Stands Up The Street

    $50.6 Billion in revenue, $10.5 Billion in net profit and $235 Billion in the bank. Let’s get one thing straight, 99.9% of the companies in the world would love to have those kind of numbers. And while this fell into the range of Apple’s forward-looking guidance, it did fall short of the expectations of the analysts.

    This was the first time in 13 years (!) that Apple posted lower year-over-year sales. Apple saw lower iPhone sales than last year at this time. However, keep in mind that was when the iPhone 6 was at its peak. Nevertheless, Apple sold 51.1 million iPhones and said they are having difficulty keeping up with the demand for the recently released iPhone 5se.

    Mac sales and iPad sales also declined as expected with Apple selling a bit over 4 million Macs and 10.25 million iPads. On the bright side, Services revenue increased 20% to almost $6 billion and “other” products which include Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats and iPod generated $2.189 billion which is 30% growth.

    Apple’s board of directors both increased the dividend paid on Apple shares to $0.57 which is about a 10% raise and increased their share buy-back program. With Apple being so widely held, this dividend increase makes Apple one of the largest payers of dividends in the world. Since the start of their dividend and share re-purchase program, Apple has returned over $163 billion to shareholders, the majority of that being in the form of share buy-backs.

    Apple’s guidance for the current quarter which ends at the end of June also projects a year-over-year decline in revenues. They forecast sales in the range of $41-$43 billion which is also lower than analysts predicted.

    There is no sugar-coating these results which were for the most part, a miss. Forecasting demand, revenue and margin is tricky and there are a bunch of factors that enter into this calculation and a bunch more that are ready to blow up the forecast. International monetary trends, new product introductions are all a bit of a wild card.

    There is some good news hidden in the report. Apple said that the iPhone enjoys an unprecedented 95% loyalty rate, Apple Pay is seeing 1 million new users a week, 13 million people subscribe to Apple Music and Apple’s installed base is 1 billion devices and growing.

    Apple had a huge hit with the iPhone 6 and that did push sales to a peak level last year. It was an anomaly, however, and Apple’s business is still incredibly strong, just a bit more down to earth. You can’t hit home runs every time at bat! Tim Cook says the product pipeline is strong and I believe him.

    Hey, I didn’t have to come up with a new adjective to describe what Apple did to the street this quarter. That’s a fringe benefit. Putting this all into perspective is important. It is not like Apple is losing money or losing customers. In fact, the opposite is true. In three short months, they made over $10 billion in profit and sold millions and millions of iPhones, iPads and Macs! Now, if Small Dog could just do a tiny fraction of that…

  • Be Alert for Deepfake Phishing Scams

    Phishing scams have entered a new, AI-powered phase and can now convincingly mimic real people. Attackers can generate fake voice or video deepfakes…