Dictation (not to be confused with com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore.speechrecognitiond) is using significant amounts of memory. It starts at under 600MB but before I restarted the Mac it had exceeded 12GB of memory.
Mac mini 2018 or later
Hello DenebQuarlo,
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities! I see you've had an issue with system resources being used with keyboard dictation, and I'd like to do what I can to help out.
Has this happened again since you restarted your Mac?
Do you periodically restart your Mac to refresh it?
Were you offline at the time? If keyboard dictation on Mac doesn’t work as expected shows to use Voice Control if you need to be able to dictate when you're offline.
Control your Mac and apps using Voice Control has the information about that feature. If the keyboard dictation is still causing issue, try Voice Control instead.
Here's the information for Dictate your messages and documents on Mac to compare the features.
Take care!
Hey DenebQuarlo,
Thanks for the reply, additional info and screenshot. We appreciate it!
If you start your Mac up in safe mode, and test with keyboard dictation for awhile, do you still see the memory usage as before?
Keep in mind that with safe mode your Mac will take longer than normal to start up. Plus, you may see some flashing or unusual display behavior. This is expected, and by restarting normally you'll exit safe mode.
Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac
After restarting normally, see if the memory behavior is still the same. Safe mode also does some system checks, so it can clear up some funky issues.
Testing with another user can also help to isolate this issue further. If you need to create a test user: How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac
Thanks!
Q. Has this happened again since you restarted your Mac?
A. Yes. It happens every time I restart my Mac and I restart it every few days on average (depending on what I am doing of course)
Q. Were you offline at the time?
A. As in connected to the Internet? Yes.
Safe mode results were: Diction used 9.8MB but dictaion was useless because none of the microphones worked. So I restarted and Dictation rose to 10.12GB after a couple of days but it didn't get into the 20GB+ numbers like before.
Now when I want to free up the memory I disable Voice Control until Dictation terminates then I re-enable Voice Control.
Disable it from Systems Preferences, search for Dictation, then disable from keyboard and then disable it from accessibility. I find that if you only disable it from keyboard and kill the processes, it just respawns the processes. But once you disable from accessibility it will stop consuming resources.
I appreciate your input however I am trying to use dictation therefore I don't want to disable it.
I am just surprised that it uses so much memory and I am concerned about recommending it's use to anyone with a machine that has 16GB or less memory.
The bottom line I guess is that I think that is way too much memory being consumed by the Dictation process when it is being enabled, and I was wondering if there was a way to either limit it or if this is actually considered a problem?
I am going to test it on a 4GB MacBook Air (instead of this 32GB mini) and see what happens
Dictation Process memory
