The amount of free space required to download this software varies by language. To activate this handy feature, first-time users must activate Enhanced Dictation and choose the languages that they wish to use it with, at which point macOS will download additional software to enable the offline dictation.

Local processing, however, requires space on the disk to store the software resources required for an accurate and fast conversion of voice into text. Why? Because Apple has moved the speech recognition process onto the Mac and so now everything is done locally on your machine. With Enhanced Dictation, users can dictate continuously without the need for an active internet connection and the text will appear much more quickly in the document than with the regular Dictation feature. This is why the default Dictation feature doesn’t need a huge amount of storage space on the Mac, all the processing happens remotely on Apple’s servers instead of locally.Īvailable in OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later, Enhanced Dictation brings a major change into the process.

The same applies when users ask Siri a question or dictate using the built-in voice-controlled assistant: the dictation is recorded and sent to Apple for the request to be processed. It is a system-wide voice input tool but for it to work users need an active internet connection because the speech recognition process is all done on Apple’s servers. Enhanced Dictation and Storageĭictation, a macOS feature that converts the user’s spoken words into text, was introduced with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012. And not just a small amount, either: we are talking about gigabytes of space occupied by language files that you may not need. Apple’s Enhanced Dictation is an accurate and privacy-aware speech recognition tool, but it comes at a cost: storage. Those who have used Dictation on a Mac will already have experienced how neat it is to have a virtual assistant that does the hard work of transcribing speech into a text document.

Activate voice to text mac