Catalina Voice Control

Disappointing Dictation

First of all I tried Voice Control dictation into Drafts. This is where I normally work with DragonDictate. Nothing happened. None of the words I spoke got turned into text. I decided to give Voice Control dictation a go in Textedit. I was slightly surprised when it did actually start to work. It only works with short pieces of speech and it was unable to complete a full sentence. This would make it extremely frustrating to work with. All of your thoughts will be truncated as you try to get the ideas out of your head and onto the page.

On too many occasions Voice Control dictation missed out either whole sentences or parts of a sentence. It would then be necessary to go back to where the text was supposed to be and dictate the words a second time. This is extremely annoying when trying to dictate. It works worse than when using Siri dictation or the enhanced Siri dictation in Mojave or on iOS.

Where the dictation did work with Voice Control I have to say I was impressed with the accuracy. It didn’t seem to have any problems with my accent or how I spoke. This may be due to the fact it’s using a UK dictionary. This wasn’t the case when I tried out the Voice Control accessibility feature on iOS. The only dictionary available was the US English. I like to have a full stop at the end of the sentence and not a period.

Continuous Improvements?

I’d like to think that this is just the first iteration of Voice Control with improvements to come. There will be upgrades coming once Catalina is formally introduced to the world. I would expect continuous enhancements after that. Hopefully there will be artificial intelligence or machine learning helping to improve the way the dictation works. For the moment though, there is no way I would give up Dragon Dictate in favour of using Mac OS Catalina Voice Control.

Not Fit For Purpose

The Voice Control feature has been packaged as an accessibility feature. It is for people who have a need to dictate because they can’t properly use a keyboard. This feature is going to have to get better quickly or even the people this has been designed for are going to get really annoyed. It just isn’t good enough as it stands right now.