MacOS – Dictation just stopped working

macosvoice-dictation

I've been using Dictation in TextEdit for several months now. Yesterday, out of the blue, it stopped working. The microphone icon appears and it responds to my voice, but no text appears. I've been using it with "Use Enhanced Dictation". I tried unchecking and checking again,turning Dictation On/Off, and switching languages (English (United States) and English (United Kingdom)) but this did not help. What is wrong?

Best Answer

I know you said you already tried restarting, but here are some specific steps, in a specific order, for you to try.

Try turning off dictation.
Quit TextEdit.
Restart your computer.
Then turning dictation back on.

Let us know if that helped.

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MacOS – Dictation not working in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

I had the same problem and it drove me crazy! This helped me:

Go to ~/Library/Preferences ( ⇧+⌘+G )
Locate com.apple.assistant.plist and move it to the Trash
Open Dictation & Speech preference panel, disable dictation
Reboot
Re-enable Dictation & Speech.

Voila!

PS This hint has the nicest side-effect: In Mail, all accounts used to be offline after sleep (Small triangle icons next to account), and would only come back on after quitting and restarting Mail.app. Now, all is well again. Ts!

MacOS – Enhanced (local) dictation in Mavericks 10.9 not working

It's possible the Enhanced Dictation language pack was corrupted when it was downloaded. You could try deleting it and re-downloading it.

First, turn off Enhanced Dictation in System Prefs > Dictation. When you uncheck the box a panel will slide down that you can just Cancel (which will turn Dictation off). Next, open Finder and press shift-command-g simultaneously. In the dialog box paste the following and click go:

/System/Library/Speech/Recognizers/

In the Recognizers folder there will be two folders. Delete (or rename) the folder called SpeechRecognitionCoreLanguages. It will ask you for your password to delete (or rename) the folder. After that you can go back to System Prefs > Dictation and turn Enhanced Dictation back on. It will show you your download progress in the bottom left corner of the System Prefs window.

Best Answer

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MacOS – Dictation not working in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

MacOS – Enhanced (local) dictation in Mavericks 10.9 not working

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