Q: Dictation not working on mavericks

Back up and first tell us if normal dictation works. If normal dictation works offline certainly won't. So unclick offline dictation and then let us know if it does or doesn't work. (If it does you can try selecting offline again. Toggling off and back on did work for me on one computer.)

Open the Sound control panel. Make sure the Internal Microphone is selected (assuming that's appropriate to your computer) and make sure the input volume is set pretty high. You may want to play with the ambiant noise reduction setting. If your Mac isn't using a built in microphone you may need additional support from the company that sells the microphone.

I'm having the same issue.  It works without enhanced checked but with it checked it

just spins for a second and disappears. 

Everyone send feedback to apple from this link please if you have the same issue. 

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

I had it working great for about a week. Today all I get is a beep when I hit   fn fn. Nothing has changed on settings.  Help

My dictation stopped working, no microphone pop up just a beep with fn twice.

This worked for me: Menu / Edit select Start Dictation.  After that, fn twice worked. Why?

David

Mine is not working either. It was working just fine until a little while ago. I turn of enhanced dictation and that works but enhanced dictation won't work. Also I have tried adding a language that didn't work either and none of my settings have changed....

What worked for me was turning off dictation, then restarting the system.  Then once I went back in to turn on dictation, everything seemed to work properly again.  Turning dictation off and on without restarting didn't fix the problem, but restarting between off and on solved the issue.  Hope this helps you.

Thanks, worked like a charm!

I had the same problem.  Here's what worked for me: Go to System Prefs, Dictation & Speech.  On the left side, under the microphone, select Internal Microphone instead of Automatic.  That's all I had to do.  Works now either with or without Enhanced Dictation.  Hope this helps.

What you describe happened to me, they were working, I was using 4 languages to dictate, and just one stopped to work, micro recognized volume but wasnt writing down.
I found in other forums here that resetting the cache would work (many solutions also in this thread are different ways to achieve emptying the cache, like changing preferences between resets), i used CleanMyMac to do it (love that prog), but you can also do it with temrinal or finder finding the right cache (google a little around to detect it).

I am not talking of the language database itself, which is nearly one GB, but of a cache of less than a half GB in my case. It seems this cache is able, when getting faulty, to block the trnascription.

So, first of all, if buggy, empty your user cache for speech rec, before you delete the preferences or reinstall the language database.

Other solutions to problems (like downloading, updating, block by internal network or other programs) see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5480134

Postdata: the localization is user library, caches, com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore

I did what you said and it works.

Thank you for the Support!!!