shanen0
Level 1 (14 points)
Desktops

Q: How to train the voice dictation?

Recently bought a MacBook Pro and working (or trying to work) quite a bit with the voice dictation. However the quality of the results actually seems to be getting worse over time, whereas it's supposed to get better. I suspect that I am giving it confusing feedback, but can anyone explain how it is working or how it is supposed to work?

 

My theory is that sometimes I am editing silently but with the dictation active, and it interprets that as incorrect feedback about recognition errors that weren't there. If so, how can I figure that out and stop it from happening? The feedback coming from the Mac's side is also somewhat confusing, but it definitely seems as though the Mac is refining its interpretation for several seconds. After I have said a few more words, it often goes back and changes part of the text that was already displayed, so I think it is building better recognition results based on additional context. This might be another way that I am confusing it, since I sometimes want to go back and change part of what I dictated by inserting new words in the middle, still using the dictation.

 

As a constructive suggestion, it would be quite helpful if I could tell the Mac to play the sound it thinks it heard for some word so that I could correct the displayed words in accord with what I actually said, and then switch to a no-dictation editing mode for final polishing.

MacBook Pro with Retina display

Posted on May 19, 2015 7:32 PM

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shanen0

Q: How to train the voice dictation?

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  • by shanen0,

    shanen0 shanen0 May 19, 2015 7:52 PM in response to shanen0
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Desktops
    May 19, 2015 7:52 PM in response to shanen0

    Minor point of clarification... Upon reviewing Apple's webpage for Yosemite specifically, this time I noticed a comment about ambiguous text in blue, and this seems to be helpful. In particular, it seems I can re-dictate just that part. However, the appearances of the blue sections is also somewhat confusing... The false positives where there is no mistake are not bothering, but there are lots of false negatives, where the Mac thinks the results are okay but they need to be corrected.

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jun 10, 2015 6:56 PM in response to shanen0
    Level 9 (60,714 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 10, 2015 6:56 PM in response to shanen0

    Your Mac can speak any text you select using a computer-generated voice. This feature appears most often on the Services menu or the Edit menu. (For example in Safari, "Speech..." is on the Edit Menu, and choosing "Start Speaking" from there will speak the selected text).

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jun 10, 2015 6:59 PM in response to shanen0
    Level 9 (60,714 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 10, 2015 6:59 PM in response to shanen0

    Did you calibrate speech recognition?

     

    OS X Mavericks: Calibrate speech recognition


    Did you read this accessible article about speech recognition?


    Mac Basics: Dictation lets you speak text instead of typing - Apple Support


    .

  • by shanen0,

    shanen0 shanen0 Jun 11, 2015 1:11 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 11, 2015 1:11 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

    First one sounds new, but I'm running Yosemite so I may not have looked at it on that basis. Insufficient time to look at it now, but hopefully tomorrow. Pretty certain the other one has been visited several times.

     

    Your earlier reply does not seem germane to the main problem, but was perhaps following on the voice font topic?

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jun 11, 2015 7:21 AM in response to shanen0
    Level 9 (60,714 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 11, 2015 7:21 AM in response to shanen0

    >>Your earlier reply does not seem germane to the main problem, ...<<

     

    Each of you queries that I have been able to find starts with your main query, then diverges into one to three additional general topics about the Mac.

     

    If you want terse, to the point answers, you need to work on separating your multi-topic queries into a single post for each of the many, many topics you have raised.

  • by shanen0,

    shanen0 shanen0 Jun 12, 2015 9:48 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 12, 2015 9:48 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

    Perhaps the largest problem I'm having with the Mac is the constant flow of distractions? I start with what seems to be a simple problem, but I encounter 17 more without making any clear progress towards the original one? At this point, I'd say that 3/4 of the other problems are just minor obstacles that I manage to overcome, but with at least a bit of thought that tends to draw down my original stock of energy. At some point, I seem to become pretty frustrated...

     

    Now on the new lead for calibrating the speech recognition in Maverick. No such animal in Yosemite. I wound up wandering around for a while checking possibly related menus and commands within the Accessibility section. Having done a lot of work with a blind woman, I am especially intrigued by the related features of the Mac, but... Not helpful in my case, and I never could find anything that seemed to be giving me insight into the speaker-specific training, either in terms of the status or in terms of triggering it. Actually, I suspect that the option you referred to in Maverick was for command training, not general speech recognition... Eventually, I wound up trapped in the VoiceOver mode, and getting out of that became the next obstacle to overcome.

     

    The joke version is that when you're up to your neck in alligators, it can be hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.

     

    It seems I should just be satisfied with what it is actually able to do, at least as long as I think I'm saving some of the input time... However, if I went into the list of distractions that I encountered so far today…