Then the scene from my imaginary episode of Star Trek continues with a fierce space battle between the USS Enterprise and ten Romulan battleships while Mozart’s “Air In G” plays in the background. Countless episodes of sci-fi movies shows us that one of the major dreams of humans is to be able to have a conversation with computers. Your Mac OS X has a great speech recognition technology that is overlooked by most of its users. And even if we are still far from what the sci-fi movies dream about, talking with your Mac could be a very fun thing to do. The Figure of Speech To enable the speech recognition ability and use speech commands on your Mac, the first thing you have to do is open the Speech menu from System Preferences. To make sure that your Mac acknowledges your command, put the checkmark into Speak command acknowledgement option.

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The Voice behind The Machine We now come to the personal preferences part – which voice do you want to speak to you? Personally, I like a girl’s voice as I consider my Mac to be a female.

Using the “say” command by itself is a good way to play a practical joke, or use it for other text-to-speech uses; but, many people will find it useful to save the voice out for later use. You can right click on the text and click Stop Speaking. You can press the key combination again to stop speaking. In the System Preferences window where you set the Voice and Key Combination you can also make the computer announce the time and warn you when a pop-up window appears. First, you’ll need to enable the Dictation feature. Click the Apple menu at the top of your screen and select System Preferences. Click the Dictation & Speech icon in the System Preferences pane and ensure Dictation is set to On. Enable the Enhanced Dictation option and your Mac will download the appropriate dictionary from Apple’s servers. You can use dictation commands to tell your Mac what to do. Without Enhanced Dictation, your spoken words and certain other data are sent to Apple to be converted into text and help your Mac understand what you mean. Once you’ve enabled Enhanced Dictation mode on your Mac, there are many additional Apple dictation commands that you can use to get the results you want. When you’re really serious about leveraging the power of speech to text functions built-into Mac OSX, knowing all the additional verbal commands Apple provides can save you a ton of editing time on the back-end of the process. If you'd like to begin conversing with your Mac, it is a simple process to enable speech recognition. Here's how: Step 1: Go into System Preferences and choose Speech.