Dictation

https://macmost.com/printable-mac-enhanced-dictation-cheat-sheet.html

By the way, the first time you might want to turn voice control off as you go through the sentences, and then later turn voice control on.

There are several sections, so without further ado, let's start with text selection

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello, welcome back to Celebrate Creativity and the final episode in this series regarding voice control. Episode 624, Dictation. Many people, myself included, believe that the biggest problem with using dictation is knowing how to edit. There are special commands that you can use to move the cursor, select, delete, and replace text. There are also ways to get punctuation marks and special symbols. But remembering all these dictation commands can be difficult. So I'm including a link to a list of dictation commands for you to print and keep nearby while dictating text to your Mac. It might help to have enhanced dictation turned on in system preferences, keyboard, dictation, to use these. Now this list is copyright by McMost, and I'm including a link to it because the list does a great job in helping you remember the myriad commands necessary for editing text. And no, I certainly don't expect you to remember all these commands from one or two podcast episodes, but I want to go over them so that you can go back and refer to a cheat sheet listing the dictation commands. The URL and the show notes for the episode that it is it's there, so you can print the list and have it next to your computer. And then of course here you can go to the show notes and and uh find that URL to get this cheat sheet. By the way, the first time uh you might want to turn on voice control, excuse me, uh by the way, the first time you might want to try and turn voice control off as you go through the sentences, and then later turn voice control on. Let me go over that again. The first time you might want to turn voice control off as you go through the sentences, and then later turn voice control on. There are several sections, so without further ado, let's start with text selection. Again, it would be unrealistic to expect you to remember all of these commands by just being exposed to them once. But hopefully, by going over them repeatedly, you will find yourself dictating effectively to your Macintosh without touching the keyboard or mouse. First, let's start with uh select that family. Say select all, and guess what? Everything will be selected. Say select sentence and the last sentence will be selected. Say select previous sentence and the previous sentence will be selected. The delete that commands are very similar. In the sentence, I live in a big house made of bricks. If you wanted to edit out made of bricks, you could simply say delete made of bricks. The same thing applies to uh delete phrase, delete word, or delete the previous sentence or even delete next paragraph. Now for the move cursor and scroll commands, for example, you could say move cursor to beginning of paragraph or to end of line. Move cursor before a specific phrase, or move cursor after a specific phrase are also extremely useful. You can uh move to the uh beginning of a paragraph by simply saying move to beginning of paragraph. Not surprisingly, you can say move to the end of a paragraph by simply saying move to end of paragraph. You can bold a paragraph by saying select paragraph and bold that. See anything that's selected, you can simply say bold that. Of course, when you make a mistake, don't instantly freak out. Undo that before you go ahead. Remember to speak naturally and clearly if you want voice control to understand what you're trying to say. Often voice control might start typing a word, and then by the end of the sentence, it realizes, without you doing anything, that you probably didn't mean what it typed and changes that word to a more appropriate. But then there are times it just doesn't have a clue. For example, and this is rather understandable, I was using voice control uh to dictate the uh the famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, get thee to a nunnery. By the way, in Shakespeare's time, nunnery could mean a brothel as well as a place where nuns lived. But anyway, voice control was completely confused by the term, and it came out, get thee to a notary. I doubt that Hamlet or Ophelia in the play were talking about an Elizabethan version of HR block. And I later learned uh that I could go to system preferences and add the word nunnery to the vocabulary that voice control recognized. It was almost an automatic process when I typed the word and then a box came up that allowed me to record it. And sure enough, when I said the word get thee to a nunnery later, it understood the word nunnery right when I said it. Now for the easiest and the final part of this episode about dictation, I I kinda usually like to end with the easiest part. You can get a comma by simply saying comma. To get a dash or a hyphen, simply say dash. To get a semicolon, say semicolon. And to get a question mark, simply say question mark. The same is is true for exclamation mark. Uh and uh an especially useful command is the one for press return key, which is simply press return key. And one dictation command that I find especially useful is new line for new line or new paragraph for a new paragraph. Well, I think I saved the easiest part for last, and I encourage you to go over the voice control dictation cheat sheet, which you can print out and put your beside and put beside your computer. And don't forget that if you have a question, don't hesitate to go to Chat GPT or Gemini to explain your situation. I know Chat GPT is especially helpful, especially if you're thorough in your details of the question and what you want from voice control. Now let me reiterate that you don't and you can't learn voice control in a day. It's like learning to play the piano or become skilled at a specific sport. You can't and don't become proficient in a half an hour. It requires time and effort, and I can guarantee if you stay with it, then you'll find yourself operating your Macintosh with only your voice. I wanted to keep this episode short because there's so much information in it, and next week I want to start a new series of podcast episodes called Hall of Imagination. And in fact, I think I'm going to have a promo on Monday of next week. You see, in Hall of Imagination, uh the Night Watchman you may have met in earlier episodes gets a job in a wax museum. The episodes are devoted to his experiences as the uh wax figures representing royalty, the presidents, inventors, composers, writers, scientists, monsters, fictional characters, and some of the greatest individuals who have ever lived come to life, as well as somehow some of those who have never lived, all these coming to life. Well, thank you for listening and join this podcast for Hall of Imagination.