People have been talking (occasionally with expletives) to their computers since way before they could listen. And while speech-to-text has been technically feasible for decades, it has not reached widespread adoption. Apple’s recent investments in data centers has allowed them to deploy services such as iCloud and Siri.
Siri’s lesser-known counterpart is simple speech-to-text dictation. This service is available to any Mac with Mac OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, as well as the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, 4th generation iPod touch, and 3rd generation iPad.
On your iOS device, tap the microphone to the left of the space bar and start talking. On a Mac, make sure that dictation is turned on by navigating to the “Dictation & Speech” preference pane in System Preferences. Then, whenever you need to enter text, select a text field and press the fn (Function key) twice. You can speak continuously for up to 30 seconds at a time. When you are finished speaking, click Done or press the fn key twice again.
Dictating to your technological artifact is almost exactly like speaking to humanoid interlocutors, except for a few key differences. Computers have yet to master the intricacies of the more implicit parts of human speech, which means that punctuation, special characters, and symbols must be made explicit.
In order to become a better understood by your device, I would recommend devouring this knowledge base article.
Did you know you can say “smiley” and dictate a smiley emoticon? 🙂