

If you click it it will say Sleep and that allows you to put it back to sleep. If it says Wakeup that means it's not currently listening. You have a Sleep and Wakeup button here so you can easily turn it off. This little control shows you your microphone and you can drag it around anywhere on the screen where it's not in your way. So you can see I clicked on Sleep over here. So if you turn this on it's going to start listening to you right away.

Now it's part of Voice Control under Accessibility.

Previous to macOS Catalina this was called Enhanced Dictation. This is the same feature that allows you to control menu items and click buttons and do all sorts of things but it also includes enhanced dictation functionality. If you want to get more serious about dictation you have to go under Accessibility and then scroll down to Voice Control. It's very simple and there aren't a lot of commands. This is useful for dictating very small pieces of text like say a text message or a quick one sentence response to an email message. So you're speaking text and it's being sent over the internet to an Apple server and then being returned as text. As you can see here what is happening is you're getting Siri-like functionality. The first way is to go to System Preferences and then you go to Keyboard, and under Dictation you can turn on Dictation here. So there are two ways to dictate text using your voice on your Mac. There you could read more about it, join us, and get exclusive content. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 500 supporters. Today let's take a look at using Voice Dictation in macOS Catalina. Check out Learn How To Use Dictation On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
