How to install/enable Enhanced Dictation automatically?

Question

Level 6

13,697 points

How to install/enable Enhanced Dictation automatically?

Mavericks has a new version of the Dictation feature previously available in Mountain Lion. In Mountain Lion it only worked by (like the iPhone) sending speech to Apple's servers to be processed and therefore required a live Internet connection. Mavericks supports this same mode still, but also now offers an 'Enhanced Dictation' mode where the processing is done locally on the Mac itself and therefore does not require a live Internet connection.

The normal way to enable this Enhanced Dictation mode is to open System Preferences, click on Dictation & Speech and tick the options to turn on Dictation and Use Enhanced Dictation. This will trigger a download and installation of the required software. However as should be obvious this requires manually intervention to do this. If one is wanting to build a number of Macs with this feature enabled this rapidly becomes tedious in the extreme.

Is there anyway to manually download an installer which can be run on Macs to do this? If not is there a way to write a preference e.g. defaults write which would trigger this automtically? Either approach could then be incorporated in an imaging process like DeployStudio.

Posted on Nov 3, 2013 6:55 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 3, 2013 7:01 AM in response to John Lockwood

The way to do this would be to install OS X to an external drive and configure it as you want, and then use cloning software to mirror the drive other Macs; however, this will also mirror the current user accounts (though if you set it up only with a single default admin account that you would use anyway on these Macs, then this should not matter).

Beyond this, you will have to do it manually for each system.

Reply

Answer 2

John Lockwood Author

Level 6

13,697 points

Nov 3, 2013 7:08 AM in response to Topher Kessler

Yes I forgot to mention this in my message. As you say one could image a fully configured Mac and use that to clone (via DeployStudio) to others. However I am moving away from this approach to using an image generated by InstaDMG as this 'installs' on to the client and makes sure that for example the network interfaces are named properly.

If you used the first cloning approach then because on a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air en0 corresponds to a different physical interface you can have the situation where the interfaces are named wrong. On a MacBook Pro en0 is the built-in Ethernet interface on a MacBook Air it is the Wi-Fi interface. If you used a MacBook Pro image on the MacBook Air then the Wi-Fi interface would be called Ethernet.

So I am hoping to install a pkg in to the InstaDMG image during a DeployStudio workflow, or set a preference via defaults write.

Reply

Answer 3

John Lockwood Author

Level 6

13,697 points

Nov 12, 2013 1:06 PM in response to John Lockwood

I tried spotting whatever temporary download was triggered by System Preferences but could not find it, I was however able to use a network packet capture tool (WireShark) to capture network traffic when I triggered the download of enhanced dictation. It turns out that Enhanced Dictation is downloaded using the following URL for UK English at least, other countries will have their own URLs.

http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/54/11/091-8424/ztfbfkf3k3hdwuqq7sd6i0lr 0b6rexi6tm/SpeechRecognitionCoreLanguage_en_GB.pkg

I was then able to download and save the installer which I will be able to deploy as part of imaging new computers. All I now need to do is set the correct preferences via "defaults write" to turn it on.

Reply

Answer 4

Feb 1, 2014 9:19 AM in response to John Lockwood

Hello John!

So I have download the package and have it on my desktop.. I already install it, but still, when I activate the enhanced dictation function on my preferences the os tries to download the file once again ...

My connection is super slow and it constantly fails so its impossible to download for me that way... ..

how can I, via "defaults write" or other way, change the download adress to a local server or made my os see the pkg that I have already installed?

Reply

Answer 5

John Lockwood Author

Level 6

13,697 points

Feb 1, 2014 9:34 AM in response to Albertoglezroges

I don't have a Mavericks machine handy right now (I am currently at home) but the following information should help you.

First the link I provided is for the UK language version, there will be different but presumably similar links for other locations, e.g. USA, Australia, etc. You will need to do the samething I did to find the right link for you I am afraid which is run a packet capture to spot the URL System Preferences starts to download, I would guess most or all will contain SpeechRecognitionCoreLanguage but searching for http://swcdn.apple.com would be another option.

Second, your right, after installing it you also need to set via defaults some preferences. Again not having access to a Mavericks machine right now I cannot tell you the exact settings, but I would look in both /Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Preferences for files relating to speech recognition. Perhaps have both these folders open in the Finder in list view.

I would then in System Preferences turn on the options for Enhanced recognition for your country, yes this will start a download which you would need to do anyway for the packet capture as described above. This will also put the correct settings in the appropriate plist file. You should then in the Finder be able to see which file just got modified, this will confirm which file contains the settings.

You can then run -

sudo defaults read /path/to/file/com.apple.whateveritiscalled

This will read and display all the settings in that file. You can then see which ones contain the settings you need. I think from memory there are two settings you need to look for.

You could stop the download which is done by turning off the settings in System Preferences. You can then manually download the file presumably having found the URL in the packet capture. You can then do

sudo defaults write /path/to/file/com.apple.whateveritiscalled whatevertheprefiscalled whateverthesettingis

Reply

Answer 6

Feb 1, 2014 9:50 AM in response to John Lockwood

Thanks John I'll try that...

It will be super usefull if you can tell me later, when your are on mavericks. the exact names or situations you saw on your machine, im a novice on mac and having internet issues does not help me 😟

Thanks a lot for your time!

Reply

Answer 7

Feb 1, 2014 10:19 AM in response to John Lockwood

so I found this file com.apple.speech.recognition.AppleSpeechRecognition.prefs.plist it shows me where my mac is going for the download.. I already have the file on my desktop, but when I subtitute the online adress for my local adress the OS automatically re/establish the old one so it goes again for the online pkg 😟... im I doing it right, what im I missing?

Reply

Answer 8

phygal

Level 1

0 points

May 3, 2014 12:52 PM in response to John Lockwood

Hi John,

I realize that this might be a long shot since you posted this thread so long ago but I need to manually download the UK language pack for use with extended dictation too. I tried your link but unfortunately got a 404 error. Is it possible that you might have a different link to the language pack?

Regards,

Nikki

Reply

Answer 9

John Lockwood Author

Level 6

13,697 points

May 6, 2014 5:29 AM in response to phygal

Either there are different downloads for different versions of OS X or more likely the download URL changes when Apple update the Enhanced Speech Recognition software. Like last time I was able to find the (current) URL by installing the free WireShark packet capture software on a Mac and capturing packets while starting the download. I then stopped the download, stopped the package capture and searched for the string SpeechRecognition this gave me the following result

/content/downloads/29/00/031-1948/2sxrue641d8yah303ulp3p6etc4xdjc9ez/SpeechRecog nitionCoreLanguage_en_GB.pkg

The above is for the UK (GB) version of Enhanced Dictation, the following is the US one

/content/downloads/55/13/031-1940/chpuvr2ntbhisy2em872b4j6hsk71croja/SpeechRecog nitionCoreLanguage_en_US.pkg

WireShark also shows the host name this is from which in both cases is swcdn.apple.com which makes the complete URL as follows

UK

http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/29/00/031-1948/2sxrue641d8yah303ulp3p6e tc4xdjc9ez/SpeechRecognitionCoreLanguage_en_GB.pkg

US

http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/55/13/031-1940/chpuvr2ntbhisy2em872b4j6 hsk71croja/SpeechRecognitionCoreLanguage_en_US.pkg

Reply

Answer 10

phygal

Level 1

0 points

May 7, 2014 1:54 AM in response to John Lockwood

Hi John,

I thought as much. Thank you so very much. You are the best. This will make 'writing' my thesis a lot easier.

Nikki

Reply