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How to use Siri for voice dictation on a Mac with Mobile Mouse

by Chris Rawson Nov 19th 2011 at 10:20AM

By now just about everyone knows that you can use Siri to take dictation on an iPhone 4S, but what you may not know is that you can also use it on a Mac. If you have an app on your iPhone that allows you to access your Mac's keyboard functions remotely, you can use Siri's dictation feature on the iPhone 4S to dictate text to your Mac.

One example of an iPhone app that you can use to dictate to your Mac is Mobile Mouse. The app already allows you to control your keyboard and mouse from your iPhone, but using the new dictation button on the keyboard, you can also dictate text to your Mac. (Reader Amalesh Panse pointed out, via Twitter, that Magic Mouse works fine with Windows too.) So long as you have a cursor inserted into a text field, you can use the dictation button on your iPhone's keyboard to use Siri to dictate texts directly to your Mac using Mobile Mouse or a similar app. Conversion into text happens rather quickly, almost as quickly as it does on the iPhone's native interface.

In practice the dictation is actually quite accurate; it does make mistakes, but I managed to dictate almost all of this post using Siri via Mobile Mouse with only a few adjustments. Apart from being an extremely cool trick, this feature could also allow you to bypass paying upwards of $50 for a product like Dragon Express, which does essentially the same thing (perhaps better).

The best part is, there are no settings that you need to tweak in order to get this to work. If you already have Mobile Mouse installed on your iPhone (and Mobile Mouse Server on your Mac), you're already able to use Siri to dictate text to your computer. Seeing words I've spoken into my phone appear on my Mac's screen as if by magic is one of those whiz-bang things that totally reminds me we're living in the future.

Thanks for the tip Rohan!



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By now just about everyone knows that you can use Siri to take dictation on an iPhone 4S, but what you may not know is that you can...
 

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Steve Kline

I am having the same problem with the first word. What happens for me is that the first letter of the word that I am dictating, appears at the end of my dictation: or example I am dictating this from Magic mousef

November 21 2011 at 4:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
John

SUCH A COOL FIND! So awesome.

November 21 2011 at 3:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Adam Hill

This is a great tip. I have a similar problem as Argelius only my dictation seems to transpose the first two letters at the beginning of dictation. So if I dictate "This is a great tip!" it will turn into "Htis is a great tip!"

Also, it has trouble with punctuation as it relates to creating new paragraphs. With Siri, I can dictate "new paragraph" and it will insert a blank line and then capitalize the beginning of the first word in the new sentence. The same approach with mobile mouse seems to tell it to stop recognizing dictation.

Still, since I'm sure this isn't an officially supported usage of a .99 cent app, it is pretty great for what it does. I can enter text with only minimal changes. I only had to make a few changes on this post for instance. All of it was done with the mobile mouse app.

November 20 2011 at 1:59 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Steve

Anyway to automatically get it to capitalize the first letter of a sentence and insert two spaces automatically after each sentence?

November 20 2011 at 1:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Argelius

This is cool!

The only issue I am having is it seems to consistently miss the first 2 or so letters from my dictation. For instance, if I dictate "What time is it?", the resulting text is something like "at time is it?" Has anyone else encountered this?

November 20 2011 at 8:47 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Meredith McKay

This is so, so, so, so COOL! With a little scripting, I'll be able to control my entire house via voice command.

And BTW, if you're having trouble getting punctuation into Siri, you can just hit the appropriate keys on the onscreen keyboard.

November 19 2011 at 10:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Brian Flores

That my be the single most useful app I've seen previewed on TUAW. I have an old 24" iMac that I use mainly to listen to music & watch movies, and this almost eliminates the need for me to keep an external keyboard & mouse for it.

November 19 2011 at 3:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
HermyNacho

I just tried this, and it works like a charm! Mobile Mouse connected flawlessly in an instant as well! Very very impressive!

November 19 2011 at 1:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Thom Parker

I'm testing the new mobile mouse function on my phone

November 19 2011 at 12:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David

Works like a charm. Very nice. Would be perfect if the server worked on the iPad. I use Dragon for more complex documents but this does a good job with simple dictation without opening the massive Dictate program.

November 19 2011 at 11:55 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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