Like others here, I am disappointed that the Dictate software has to involve Siri and the sharing of information – from what I can tell entirely irrelevant to dictation – with the Cloud. As another person said, I pay a great deal of money to use a Mac – it would be helpful if we could go back to the old system where you can just dictate without Apple having access to the entire contents of your computer.
You pay for the hardware. The operating system belongs to Apple and is licensed to you. Apple round-trips your spoken content to Apple dictation servers, instead of the old localized enhanced dictation that gave up accuracy for immediacy. Yes, there is room for dictation improvement, and Apple is already on record for its commitment to user privacy.
Although in theory, Siri voice recognition is supposed to be an advancement, I remember that voice recognition was better in Classic Mac OS running on a PowerPC when Apple actually had a dedicated team working on it. If the current macOS voice recognition could be as good as the handwriting recognition on a Newton MessagePad 2100, then we could rejoice.
As it stands, you may wish to send the macOS product team feedback about the state of Dictation on macOS.
Thank you. I appreciate the licensing issue, but the fact remains that I am not happy with the current conditions for using the dictation app. Thank you for suggesting I send feedback. I just did.
Privacy and Apple Dictation
