OS X Mountain Lion includes speech recognition, which you can activate by opening System Preferences (Apple menu→System Preferences), selecting Dictation & Speech, and clicking the On radio button on the Dictation tab.
Using it is very simple—just tap the Fn key twice (or one of the Control keys if you’re using a full-sized external keyboard) and then speak. Double-tap the key again when you’ve finished.
Specifying Capital Letters, Spacing, and Line Breaks
Here’s how to specify capitalization when dictating:
• Capitalizing a word: Say “cap” before the word you to capitalize. For example, to enter the phrase “We should all read the good Book,” you would say, “We should all read the good cap Book.”
• Using title case (capitalizing the start of each word): Say “caps on” before the words you want in title case and then say “caps off” after. For example, for the phrase “The Town of Bath is Lovely in Spring,” you’d say “caps on the town of bath is lovely in spring caps off.”
• Block capitals: To capitalize an entire word (the equivalent of using Caps Lock when typing), say “all caps.” For the phrase “I need the report RIGHT NOW,” you’d dictate “I need the report all caps on right now all caps off.” An individual word can be put in capitals by just saying “all caps” before it: “I need the report all caps now and not later” produces “I need the report NOW and not later.”
• All lowercase: To dictate words without any capitalization whatsoever, use “no caps” in the same way as described for “all caps.” Dictating “I want to live in no caps on new york no caps off” produces “I want to live in new york.”
• Prevent hyphenation: OS X’s Dictation feature is clever enough to hyphenate words that need it, but you can stop it from doing so by saying “spacebar”: “This is a low spacebar budget enterprise” will produce “This is a low budget enterprise.
• Force hyphenation: Should you say something you think should be hy- phenated but OS X’s Dictation doesn’t realize, you can simply say “hyphen” —“He was a no hyphen good man” will type “He was a no-good man.”
• Remove spaces altogether: To create a sentence or series of words without spaces between them (compounding words), use “no space.” As with the dictation terms earlier, it can be used singularly to indicate two words should be joined, or it can be turned “on” and “off” before and after a series of words: “We are best no space friends” will type “We are best- friends”; saying “We are no space on best friends forever no space off” will type “We are bestfriendsforever.”
• Inserting line breaks: To insert a line break, just say “new line.” To insert a paragraph break (that is, an empty line before the following sentence), just say “new para.”
Specifying Punctuation, Symbols, and Numerals
In most cases, inserting punctuation is intuitive and obvious. Saying “full stop” or “period” will insert that symbol, for example. Saying “copyright sign” will insert a copyright symbol, and saying “at sign” will insert @. Saying “inverted question mark” will produce the ¿ symbol.
OS X will automatically insert “curly quotes” but if you specifically want a noncurly quotation mark, say “backquote.”
Currency symbols, including the dollar, must be followed by “sign” if not used with numbers: to say “$31” you can simply say “thirty-one dollars” but to type “We need more $,” you would have to say “We need more dollar sign.”
You can also insert a long dash by saying “em dash.” To insert ellipsis (…), say either “dot dot dot” or “ellipsis.”
Should you want to use Roman numerals, just say them as you would nor- mally preceded by numeral: “The year of my birth was numeral MCMLXXII.” Similarly to inserting an actual number rather than the word for the number (that is, “5” rather than “five”), say “numeral” beforehand: “He reported there were numeral five of them" will type “There were 5 of them.”
Inserting Emoticons
What if you want to indicate your vague emotional state via clever use of punctuation? Apple has thought of that. Simply saying “smiley face,” “winky face,” and “frowny face” will insert :-), ;-), and :-(, respectively.
Navigating Around Text
Although navigating the cursor through text is best done via the keyboard or mouse, the dictation tool offers two commands to move the cursor: “next line” will move the cursor to the next line of text, while “next paragraph” will move it to the next paragraph.
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