word speech to text mac

Mac User Guide

• MacBook Air
• MacBook Pro
• What’s new in macOS Sequoia
• Work on the desktop
• What’s in the menu bar?
• Quickly change settings
• What’s in the Apple menu?
• Search with Spotlight
• Get notifications
• Open apps from the Dock
• Organize your files in the Finder
• Connect to the internet
• Sign in to your Apple Account
• Set up iCloud
• Browse the web
• Preview a file
• Take a screenshot
• Change your display’s brightness
• Adjust the volume
• Use trackpad and mouse gestures
• Use Touch ID
• Print documents
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Apps on your Mac
• Work with app windows
• Tile app windows
• Use apps in full screen
• Use apps in Split View
• Use Stage Manager
• Get apps from the App Store
• Install and reinstall apps from the App Store
• Install and uninstall other apps
• Create and work with documents
• Open documents
• Mark up files
• Combine files into a PDF
• Organize files on your desktop
• Organize files with folders
• Tag files and folders
• Back up files
• Restore files
• Change System Settings
• Choose your desktop picture
• Add and customize widgets
• Use a screen saver
• Add a user or group
• Add your email and other accounts
• Automate tasks with Shortcuts
• Create Memoji
• Change your login picture
• Change the system language
• Increase the size of what’s on your screen
• How to use Siri
• Customize Siri
• What are Siri Suggestions?
• Use Siri results
• Add Siri Shortcuts
• Get started with Apple Intelligence
• Use Writing Tools
• Use Apple Intelligence in Mail
• Use Apple Intelligence in Messages
• Use Apple Intelligence with Siri
• Get webpage summaries
• Summarize an audio recording
• Use Apple Intelligence in Photos
• Summarize notifications and reduce interruptions
• Apple Intelligence and privacy
• Set up a Focus to stay on task
• Block pop-ups in Safari
• Use Dictation
• Perform quick actions with hot corners
• Send emails
• Send text messages
• Make a FaceTime call
• Edit photos and videos
• Use Live Text to interact with text in a photo
• Start a Quick Note
• Get directions
• Intro to Continuity
• Use AirDrop to send items to nearby devices
• Hand off tasks between devices
• Control your iPhone from your Mac
• Copy and paste between devices
• Stream video and audio with AirPlay
• Make and receive calls and text messages on your Mac
• Use your iPhone internet connection with your Mac
• Share your Wi-Fi password with another device
• Use iPhone as a webcam
• Insert sketches, photos, and scans from iPhone or iPad
• Unlock your Mac with Apple Watch
• Use your iPad as a second display
• Use one keyboard and mouse to control Mac and iPad
• Sync music, books, and more between devices
• Manage Apple Account settings
• Set your Apple Account picture
• What is iCloud?
• What is iCloud+?
• Store files in iCloud Drive
• Share and collaborate on files and folders
• Manage iCloud storage
• Use iCloud Photos
• Get started with Screen Time
• Set up Screen Time for yourself
• Set up Screen Time for a child
• Track app and device usage
• Set time limits for apps and websites
• Set up content and privacy restrictions
• Set up Family Sharing
• Get Family Sharing recommendations
• Add family members to a Family Sharing group
• Remove family members from a Family Sharing group
• Manage sharing and parental settings
• Share a Photo Library
• Collaborate on projects
• Find content shared with you
• Find your family and friends
• Watch and listen together with SharePlay
• Listen to podcasts
• Watch TV shows and movies
• Read and listen to books
• Read the news
• Track stocks and the market
• Play games with your friends
• Apple Music
• Apple Arcade
• Apple News+
• Apple Podcasts
• Manage subscriptions in the App Store
• View your family subscriptions
• Connect an external display
• Use the built-in camera
• Connect a wireless accessory
• Connect a printer to your Mac
• Connect AirPods to your Mac
• Optimize your Mac battery life
• Optimize storage space
• Burn CDs and DVDs
• Control accessories in your home
• Run Windows on your Mac
• Get started
• Control what you share
• Set up your Mac to be secure
• Allow apps to see the location of your Mac
• Use Private Browsing
• Keep your data safe
• Understand passwords
• Change weak or compromised passwords
• Keep your Apple Account secure
• Use Mail Privacy Protection
• Use Sign in with Apple for apps and websites
• Find a missing device
• Shut down or restart your Mac
• Start up your Mac in safe mode
• Keep your Mac up to date
• Reinstall macOS
• Erase your Mac
• Resources for your Mac
• Resources for your Apple devices

Dictate messages and documents on Mac

With Dictation, you can speak to enter text anywhere you can type it.

Dictation is not available in all languages or regions, and features may vary. See the macOS Feature Availability page to see which languages you can dictate in and which languages include support for additional Dictation features.

If you want to enter text and control your Mac by speaking commands, instead of using a keyboard, mouse, or trackpad, you can use Voice Control . When Voice Control is on, you use Voice Control to dictate text; standard macOS Dictation isn’t available.

Turn Dictation on or off

Open Keyboard settings for me

Go to Dictation, then turn it on or off.

If you turned on Dictation, click Enable. If you’re asked whether you want to improve Siri and Dictation, do one of the following:

Share audio recordings: Click Share Audio Recordings to allow Apple to store audio of your Siri and Dictation interactions from your Mac. Apple may review a sample of stored audio.

Don’t share audio recordings: Click Not Now.

Note: You can delete the audio interactions (which are associated with a random identifier and less than six months old) whenever you like—see Delete Siri and Dictation history .

To learn more about how Apple protects your information and lets you choose what you share, click About Ask Siri, Dictation & Privacy at the bottom of Keyboard settings, or see the Apple Privacy website .

Dictate text

In an app on your Mac, place the insertion point where you want to enter text.

Note: Press and release the Microphone key to start Dictation; press and hold the key to activate Siri (Siri must be enabled).

To insert an emoji or a punctuation mark, or perform simple formatting tasks, do any of the following:

Say the name of an emoji, like “heart emoji” or “car emoji.”

Say the name of the punctuation mark, such as “exclamation mark.”

Say “new line” (equivalent to pressing the Return key once) or “new paragraph” (equivalent to pressing the Return key twice). The new line or new paragraph appear when you’re done dictating.

For a list of the commands you can use while dictating, see Commands for dictating text .

You can dictate text of any length without a timeout. When you’re done, press the Escape key, the Microphone key (if available), or the Dictation keyboard shortcut. Dictation stops automatically when no speech is detected for 30 seconds.

Ambiguous text is underlined in blue. For example, you may get the result “flour” when you intended the word “flower.” If this is the case, click the underlined word and select an alternative. You can also type or dictate the correct text.

Set the Dictation keyboard shortcut

You can customize the key combination you press to start or stop Dictation.

Go to Dictation, click the Shortcut pop-up menu, then choose a shortcut to start Dictation.

To create a shortcut that’s not in the list, choose Customize, then press the keys you want to use. For example, you could press Option-Z.

Dictate in another language

You can change the language you dictate text in, or set up Dictation for multiple languages and switch between them as needed.

Note: Dictation is not available in all languages or regions, and features may vary. See the macOS Feature Availability page.

Go to Dictation, click the Edit button next to Languages, then select a language and region. (To remove a language, deselect it.)

Change the microphone used for Dictation

The microphone source in Keyboard settings shows which device your Mac is currently using to listen for Dictation.

Go to Dictation, click the pop-up menu next to “Microphone source,” then choose the microphone you want to use for Dictation.

If you choose Automatic, your Mac listens to the device you’re most likely to use for Dictation.

How to transcribe audio to text using Dictation on a Mac

You can use the Dictation feature built into your Mac to transcribe audio files, and in my experience, it's been about 98-99% accurate, so it saves a lot of time if you want to index your audio files, or you need a transcript for some other purpose.

These instructions were last updated for macOS Monterey 12.4.

First, open up System Preferences, go to Keyboard, then the 'Dictation' tab:

Turn on Dictation, and when prompted, accept the terms for Apple's Dictation service. Also take note of the 'Shortcut' (e.g. 'press dictation key' or 'press control twice'. You'll use that to activate dictation later.

Make sure you have your Mac's microphone selected, then open up TextEdit and create a new document:

Activate the dictation shortcut (e.g. press the dictation key), then start playing back your audio file through your Mac's speakers. The mic should pick up the audio and start transcribing live into the open document.

Bonus: Routing audio internally on the Mac with Loopback

If you have Rogue Amoeba's Loopback , you can also use it to route the audio signal internally , so you don't have to have audio playing out through the speakers.

After you have Loopback installed and running, create a new device called 'Transcription Device'. Delete the default Pass-thru source, and add in Quicktime Player as a new source:

Quit Loopback (the device will still be present on the system after quitting), then go back to the Dictation settings in System Preferences. In there, choose the new 'Transcription Device' sound input:

Then go back to TextEdit, and in a new document, activate Dictation using your configured shortcut (e.g. the dictation key). Pop over to QuickTime Player, and play your audio or video file, and watch as the words are transcribed as if by magic!

Alternative: Welder (or other online services)

As an alternative, you could use an online upload-to-transcribe service like Welder . I tested the same files on Welder that I used with Dictation, and Welder was better about adding punctuation and separating multi-person interviews.

Their transcription feature can be used for free; upload a video or audio file, and within a few minutes, you can read or download the transcribed text.

Further reading

• Transcribing recorded audio and video to text using Whisper AI on a Mac
• Recording multiple camera angles, full-size, simultaneously, on a Mac
• Achieving Pro Zoom meeting quality on my Mac
• Add new comment

This felt a little bit inefficient to me, so I did some digging and found that someone's made a command line tool for Apple's speech recognition API: https://github.com/sveinbjornt/hear

The real kicker here is that you can transcribe audio files, meaning that you don't have to wait for a video to play to get a transcript: hear -i /path/to/someone_speaking.mp3 > transcribed_text.txt

Oh nice, even better! I'll have to give it a try.

Thank you! :) Came here for this info.

Thanks for the link! I also found -d flag useful, forcing it to process video on a device. Otherwise, I got transcriptions only for the first minute of my mp3 file.

Yo when I try to follow your instructions without loopback, seems simple enough.. when i press play and go into TextEdit and begin dictation, macOS silences the audio output and this doesn’t work running macos 12.5.1 September 18 2022

When using Rogue Amoeba's loopback, you need to add a 'monitor device'. I just added the built-in speakers but you could use another audio device.

I have the same problem. How did you fix it?

This is now even easier with Whisper: https://github.com/openai/whisper

Thanks to this comment, I test drove Whisper yesterday, and wrote up this new blog post today: Transcribing recorded audio and video to text using Whisper AI on a Mac .

Thank you for the tutorial. I am trying to transcribe audio that is about a hour long. Once I start the transcribing process, the microphone stops working every 2-3 minutes. Is there a way I can make the microphone continue recording for longer periods of time? Thanks!

I would use the github suggestions, but am not familiar with using the files and have very little experience with Terminal. If anyone can direct me to some tutorials, I would appreciate that also.

When we try to do this, as soon as we start playing the audio file dictation turns off. Little microphone disappears and nothing is transcribed. There are two of us, both on Macs running Monterey. Mine's an M1 iMac, hers is a Mac Book Pro. Any ideas? She has Blackhole installed and I have SWB audio capture - will that mess it up?

I have the same issue of the audio silencing when I open the dictation on textedit. Any remedies to this without having to download another software?

same here. I'm on Monterey. As soon as I start playback, the dictation stops.

Ditto. Has anyone figured out how to keep the dictation microphone operational so that it transcribes audio files?

Is there a way to directly input a file from a digital voice recorder and have it transcribed? Or, do I have to save it as an audio file and follow one of the methods in this article? Thanks!

Can a previously recorded speech sound file be used for dictation? That is sound from a source other than a microphone. If so how is this done?

I could not install Loopback as it cannot add system items on my machine. Blackhole works as well.

I am on Sonoma. May I ask how you configured Blackhole? Based on your and another commentor I installed Blackhole, set up a multi-output profile, one of which is a Blackhole 2 channel device, then configured the system dictation source to the Blackhole device. When I activate dictation it stops the audio output and nothing happens. Thanks for any help you can offer.

Although the first solution would be great, I'm unfortunately now the 7th commenter reporting this problem:

-> "Start dictation" within TextEdit (..and Pages.app) seems to deactivate audio output from VoiceMemos. <-

Jeff Geerling or anyone else - Can you help us to somehow successfully use the 1st solution? Thank you!