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Level 1

4 points

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

Best reply

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Oct 28, 2013 10:33 AM

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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39 replies

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 4, 2014 8:53 AM in response to ceric

Well,

I think I spoke too soon… After a little while, problems with off-line dictation have come back. So – I think we need to wait for another update!

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings…

Mar 5, 2014 3:43 AM in response to ceric

Thanks Ceric. I'd come to the same conclusion.

Turns out we're famous 😁

Mar 5, 2014 4:43 AM in response to Charles Butcher

For anyone who is nervous about poking around in the Library folder to delete the cache file, I've written a tiny utility program. You can download it from:

http://www.thiswritingbusiness.com/utilities/

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

May 16, 2014 10:03 AM in response to Charles Butcher

As a continued service to the community, I have now tested "Enhanced" dictation under OS X 10.9.3, released yesterday.

Unfortunately, it still does not work.

I wonder if Apple will make it through a whole codename release in which an advertised feature is totally non-functional?

I will re-report this to Support and see what happens.

May 19, 2014 8:42 AM in response to ceric

Thanks for the update, ceric. Unbelievable! This isn't some tiny little feature of Mavericks, it was a headline thing.

ceric Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 26, 2014 2:04 AM in response to Charles Butcher

Charles and others,

As mentioned, I reopened my ticket on this particular problem.

Apple have now done quite a bit of analysis, and today asked me to temporarily uninstall my Sophos antivirus software, since it seemed to be generating errors at the time when enhanced dictation was failing.

Since doing this, enhanced dictation seems to be working. It may be, of course, that I have not yet encountered the problem.

So... are the rest of the people on this thread who are seeing the issue in question also running Sophos? That would be an interesting data point...

Aug 12, 2014 6:00 AM in response to ceric

ceric

Thanks for your continued work. Since dictation didn't work well before, I'd not bothered to try it recently.

And I'm pleased to say that with 10.9.4 it seems to work well.

I don't use Sophos and never have. I do have ClamAV/ClamXAV installed, but it doesn't run in the background and I rarely use it. So it can't solely have been responsible for the initial problem, although it seems that on your system it has contributed to the problem continuing. All very mysterious…

Charles

Aug 22, 2014 6:34 AM in response to Charles Butcher

Same here. The British English enhanced dictation thinks that "programme" is spelt "program".

😟

Aug 22, 2014 9:45 AM in response to Tom in London

Well, to be fair, it generally is – if you are writing about software. If that's your biggest issue, you are lucky you haven't seen the garbage we sometimes got before Mavericks ;-)

UK English enhanced dictation very poor accuracy