macosvoice-dictation
I have enabled dictation in the preferences, but it fails to start.
When I tap fn fn, the Icon with three dots appears, and quickly disappears. I don't see a microphone.
My system is connected to the Internet with an ADSL router, through an Ethernet LAN. I have temporarily disabled the router firewall, but it does not seem to help.
My system is in French (but I think "Dictation" should work since it is indeed called '"Dictée")
How can I have logs?
What can I investigate?
Go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options… and check “Enable dragging”.
No, your speech is still sent to the Siri/Nuance servers for processing, so you can't use dictation without an Internet connection.
An alternative would be to use a third-party dictation app like Dragon Dictate.
While your machine is probably powerful enough to handle conversion (although maybe not as quickly as Apple's servers), it makes a lot of sense for Apple to keep things on their end. The software used for conversion is doubtlessly quite complex and would be a huge download. Living on their servers also means that they can push updates as frequently and quickly as they like.
Best Answer
I had the same problem and it drove me crazy! This helped me:
~/Library/Preferences( ⇧+⌘+G )com.apple.assistant.plistand move it to the TrashVoila!
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!