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Catalina voice control is disappointing

6 points by gotrythis ↗ HN
The new voice dictation inMacOS Catalina,Is quite disappointing.If you pause between thoughts,It doesn't put a space.It capitalizes letters after commas.And it doesn't put spaces after periods.This means, you have to do a lot of editing.I was really looking forward to this feature.It also refuses to work in google chrome.So to addVoice dictation to Google Docs,RequiresUsing safari.

Am I just using it wrong?Or could it be better?

4 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 21.8 ms ] thread
mikob
If you need voice control for Chrome, I hope you don't mind if I recommend a tool that I'm developing myself: https://www.lipsurf.com

It integrates deeply with websites - eg. there's even a HN plugin so you can say things like "upvote 1st" or "comments 3rd" on HN.

gotrythis
LipSurf... Great name. Works great! :-)

Your plugin works much better than Catalina's voice control for me, and handles periods, commas, pauses, etc, all very well. Awesome tutorials. Love the cat on the keyboard. All really impressive. Also in my brief test, it didn't slow down my computer like voice control.

I'm just amazed that Apple can't get these basics of dictation right on an accessibility product, but I also have looked at videos where people had better results than I did. Need to test some more, but am keeping LipSurf in mind if I can't succeed with voice control.

gotrythis
I'll also add (by typing) that having it running in the background brought my fully loaded brand new MacBook PRO 13 inch to a crawl.
tjvc
This has been my experience too. I was looking forward to the feature and upgraded straight away to try it out (something I'd never normally do!). But I've found that response to commands is flaky, there's a noticeable performance impact, and, worst of all, dictation doesn't seem to be supported in non-Apple applications, e.g. Slack. Pretty disappointing.

I'm still using the "basic" dictation feature, which works well enough, but doesn't support editing.