If you aren’t using an Apple keyboard with an f* key, make note of or choose a different shortcut key. The default keyboard shortcut to begin dictating is to press your Mac’s fn key twice. You will see a message warning you that using your Mac’s dictation option the way it’s currently set up will send your spoken text to Apple to be converted. Click Dictation & Speech, which you’ll find in the middle of System Preferences’ fourth row.If you meet all of these criteria, you’ll be able to activate Dictate. To start using Dictate, you will need to make sure you have an active Office subscription, the latest version of Office, are connected to the Internet, and unfortunately, be located in the United States. You can enable this feature, which supports over 30 languages and many more dialects, using the Dictation & Speech preference in System Preferences.Īpple’s speech to text features are turned off by default, so before you can use this feature you need to turn it on. Dictate is included in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. You may think you have to wait for Siri to appear in macOS Sierra before you can talk to your Mac, but your Mac already has a way to listen to everything you say and to turn what it hears into text. Once again, I am in a place where I can’t work directly with my servers to test the NetInstall steps and images, so… we’ll take a brief detour here to take a quick look at your Mac’s built-in dictation features.
