The main problem is that it never learns to adapt or recognize your voice or vocabulary like professional dictation software. The voice recognition feature in macOS has never been brilliant, although it’s not terrible either.

You can also activate and deactivate Voice Control by clicking on the floating Voice Control Microphone window or saying “Wake up” or “Go to sleep”. If you click on the Commands… button, you’ll also see all the different formatting voice commands possible too that used to be available in Enhanced Dictation in Mojave. The UK English language pack is around 422MB in size so you’ll need to make sure you have enough space on your mac hard drive first. Even if you download the US English language pack, your Mac will still use Siri to translate commands. Note that this does not work for US English however. This will then automatically download the language packs you need to dictate offline in the latest versions of macOS. However the good news is that you can activate offline dictation in Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura and still have formatting commands by going to System Preferences > Accessibility > Voice Control and checking the box Enable Voice Control. In the latest versions of macOS, there’s also no apparent way of configuring useful formatting commands such as “new paragraph” and “left indent”.ĭictation in Catalina, Big Sur and Monterey will also turn itself off after 30 seconds of no voice input whereas in Mojave, it stays active until you turn it off yourself. In macOS Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura the Dictation preferences look like the panel below – the Use Enhanced Dictation option has been removed. You simply go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Dictation and check the box Enhanced Dictation in order for macOS to download the language packs necessary to dictate offline. In Mojave, the Dictation preferences look like the panel below.

Note that this works on both Intel Macs and the latest Apple Silicon M1 Macs such as the M1 MacBook Pro and the more recent M2 Macs. However, all other languages such as UK English use the old Enhanced Dictation engine used in Mojave which is based on language packs that can be downloaded and so works offline too.Īpple has also slightly changed the way you activate dictation in the latest versions of macOS too. Unfortunately, if you’re using US English, Voice Control (which is responsible for dictation in the latest versions of macOS) uses the Siri speech-recognition engine on Apple’s servers. You can still dictate offline in the latest versions of macOS depending on the language you are using. What’s Voice Recognition Like in macOS?.

How to turn on voice dictation on mac