UK English enhanced dictation very poor accuracy

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UK English enhanced dictation very poor accuracy

I have upgraded my 2013 MacBook Air from Mountain Lion to Mavericks, and am having problems with Enhanced Dictation in UK English. While 'normal' dictation works very well, with very good transcription accuracy, the Enhanced version is extremely poor - to the point of being virtually useless. French works very well - but UK English does not.

It is almost as if the download from Apple is corrupt in some way (I have deleted and re-downloaded serveral times in case it was a problem specific to my download).

Things I have tried so far:

Deleting the downloaded packages and reinstalling them
Testing internal and external microphone

If I uncheck Enhanced dictation, the accuracy is excellent. If I check it, the quality plummets.

Has anyone else seen this?

Any solutions?

Thanks!

MacBook Air, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Oct 28, 2013 4:36 AM

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Answer 1

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ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 28, 2013 10:33 AM in response to ceric

To answer my own question, I think I have found the solution.

The following sequence of actions seems to have fixed Enhanced dictation for me:

1. Disable dictation totally

2. Restart the Mac

3. Delete the downloaded Enhanced dication files (see other posts on how to do this)

4. Delete the following folder: ~Library/Caches/com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore/Users/en_GB

5. Restart the Mac

6. Re-enable dictation and Enhanced dication (this will cause the Mac to re-download the files)

Voilà!

I am guessing that something in my user profile had got corrupted.

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Answer 2

Oct 30, 2013 10:12 AM in response to ceric

Thanks! I was having just the same problem with Enhanced Dictation in UK English, and this trick seems to have fixed it. It seems odd to me that Enhanced Dictation should have been working previously, but just very badly. Perhaps it thought that we were speaking American English.

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Answer 3

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 30, 2013 10:16 AM in response to Charles Butcher

Charles,

I have found that it seems to get worse again over time... until I delete again. So watch this space.

It is almost as if the cache gets corrupted again over time...

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Answer 4

Oct 30, 2013 10:46 AM in response to ceric

Thanks again! I'll keep an eye on it…

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Answer 5

Nov 1, 2013 4:21 AM in response to Charles Butcher

And yes, today it's much worse again. This is stupid.

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Answer 6

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 1, 2013 4:24 AM in response to Charles Butcher

Charles,

May I suggest that, once you are certain that it really is worse (i.e. it is producing gibberish instead of close-to-accurate dictation), could you delete the cache again and see if it miraculously improves?

That should provide some compelling evidence for Apple that this is indeed a bug (I have an open case on this).

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Answer 7

Nov 1, 2013 12:21 PM in response to ceric

ceric

Good idea. So:

1. Dictation accuracy with UK English improved after re-installing the whole Enhanced Dictation system, but then became noticeably worse in just one day.

2. The problem is temporarily fixed by deleting ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore/Users/en_GB/ and re-starting the Mac. No need to download the whole lot again.

3. The file ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore/Users/en_GB/Info.plist contains the string "com.apple.speech.SpeechRecognitionCoreLangauge.en_GB" – note the spelling mistake. This doesn't inspire confidence!

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Answer 8

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 1, 2013 12:45 PM in response to Charles Butcher

Very interesting!

I wonder if they used dictation in the creation of the Info.plist file :-)

I will call back Apple support and refer them to this thread. Totally convinced this is simply a bug...

Thanks, Charles

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Answer 9

Nov 3, 2013 1:40 AM in response to ceric

Well, thanks for alerting Apple to this. Once fixed, it will be a very useful feature.

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Answer 10

ceric Author

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4 points

Nov 6, 2013 5:35 AM in response to Charles Butcher

FYI those interested in this topic...

AppleCare confirm that they have submitted this as a bug report to Engineering. They have promised to keep me updated on progress.

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Answer 11

Nov 6, 2013 5:54 AM in response to ceric

Excellent work. Keep us posted.

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Answer 12

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 26, 2013 2:59 AM in response to Charles Butcher

A short update:

At the request of Apple Support, I did an erase and clean install of Mavericks. On a totally clean system, the problem did not seem to be there.

I then reinstalled (only) Apple applications: Pages, Numbers, Keynote etc. and the problem came back.

However, after the recent 6.0.1 update to iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) and iMovie, the problem seems to have gone away. I can't be 100% sure yet, but so far so good...

@Charles - could you maybe share your experience? Have you got any of the Apple apps? Has updating them helped?

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Answer 13

Nov 26, 2013 4:14 AM in response to ceric

That's interesting. I have the *.0.1 updates to all the iWork apps, but I'm also hanging on to iWork '09 until Apple puts some more of the missing functionality back into Pages. And I am still seeing the dictation problem.

Unless you see the problem recurring with the latest version of iWork, we can assume that that is not to blame. So that moves the focus to iWork 09.

We've established that deleting the en_GB cache folder restores dictation performance, so at the end of the day any problems must be limited to this folder as far as the dictation system is concerned. And it sounds unlikely that any of the iWork apps could affect this folder unless they are actually launched.

But a quick test suggests that dictation performance still gets worse very quickly whether or not I launch Pages 09.

I will delete the en_GB cache folder again and avoid using any of the iWork apps, old or new, until I can check whether dictation degrades again. But I'm not hopeful.