Q: can't download the Enhanced Dictation Engine

I can use enhanced dictation but i cant download italian voice it says voices are not available

Hopefully in the  forthcoming fix for Mavericks (it can't be long, can it?) none of what BenB described will be necessary - and there will be Italian voices

I have an iMac and a Macbook Air. The Macbook Air downloaded the enhanced dictation file with no problem. My iMac refuses to (despite trying all the fixes in this thread).

According to a post on the cut-of-mac, the enhanced dictation file lets your local machine process the voice file instead of sending it back to apple's servers for processing. I wonder if Apple is allowing it for portable machines that are more likely to be used away from a network, but not allowing it for desktops?

I have this problem too, or at least a version of it.  For several days my MacBook Air has been unable to download the enhanced dictation languages files.  Every time I try, I get the same error message: "Dictation languages aren't available to download at this time.  Try again later." 

I did work through the suggestions above (in this thread) from Crownofthorns17, but they did not fix my problem.  I do have a working internet connection; I have no troubles downloading anything else.  This is my only difficulty.  Mavericks is, otherwise, working fine.

Does anybody else have suggestions that might address the issue?

Thanks for the response.  Yes, under the Language & Region preference panel, I have English as my first ("primary") language, and I have set the region as "United States."  So I don't think that is causing the problem.

You're right, my error message is not the same -- except insofar as it is also a problem with enhanced dictation downloads.  My apologies if this is diverting discussion into a slightly different channel, but this was the closest thread I could find in the support forum. 

Thanks to alex349.  I had the "An unexpected error occurred when I try to enable the Enhanced dictation engine."    Proceeded with the delete of com.apple.assistant.plist, but it was only with the added help of the procedure below that it actually worked for me.

alex349 wrote:

 

Well, that fix did indeed work for me.

 

However, I went a step further and deleted all the "com.apple.assistant" plists. Not just the one listed in the steps above, but also the ".support" and ".token" ones before rebooting. Perhaps that will help you.

 

I think that I first tried downloading Enhanced Dictation right after installing Mavericks when my Mac was slowed down by Spotlight reindexing, and had to cancel the download.

 

My guess about what happend is that the token used to get the download was never deleted in that first attempt for some reason and therefore the subsequent attempts couldn't get passed finding the download because of an issue with the token used to authenticate being outdated but since one was there it couldn't get a new one from Apple. But that is just my educated guess.

 

Now I have real dictation (used to "type" this out in part) on my Mac rather than the iOS-style Siri-backed thing that wouldn't work for long chunks of speech. Thanks for the steps to fix this and I hope my additional steps here help those for whom the first set of steps fail.

Thanks very much, I appreciate the advice.  Unfortunately this additional step didn't help in my case.  I'm still getting the same error message -- which for me is "Dictation languages aren't available to download at this time.  Try again later.."

I am trying to do the same thing. Trying to Download English Australian & get the same error as you. I tried to find com.apple.assistant.plist but it is not in the list. & I also don't want to delete something I don't know anything about. I do get an error when I start my macbook air saying I need CS5ServiceManager Java SE 6, but I have Jave 7, so I dont know if this is related or not.

I am really looking forward to using this, mostly why I upgraded plus a few other things but this is really frustrating. Can anyone help, please?

Hi,

Someone helped me with the CS5ServiceManager so thats good & obviously not related to the enhanced dictation download.

Does anyone have any updates on how to get the Enhanced Dictation, English Australian, to download apart from the above. I am still getting the same error message to try again later. Is there somewhere apart from Preferences, enhanced dictation that I can download English Australian for this?

Thanks for the instructions, but they didn't help.It was't easy to get to (com.apple.assistant.plist), but I finally did. Unfortunately, trashing it didn't help, and ,yes, I did empty the trash. Incidentally, I also called Apple but, for the first time ever, they wouldn't help me with this problem. It seems that all problems with Dictation are referred to one of their specialists, and he had not yet come to work when I called. I infer from this that fixing Dictation is not  "a walk in the park".

Does Enhanced Dictation enable you to dictate without pause for as long as you want?