Voice Recognition To Be Built Into Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

14 June, 2012

Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the 2012 World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) by opening the event with a signature keynote speech outlining a glimpse of new hardware, software and features we can expect in the near future from Apple. However it fell to Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to run through the new features in the next release of OS X for the Mac - 10.8 Mountain Lion. Of particular interest to us was the unveiling of Dictation.

Dictation brings voice recognition to the Mac at the operating system level. In it's early form Dictation will be restricted to converting speech to text only in the places where you can type. Facebook status updates, tweets, dictating emails into Mail or writing an essay in Microsoft Word or Pages.

Dictation on the Mac will use a similar looking icon to Siri, those of you with an iPhone 4S will be used to this and like the iPhone Dictation will use the in-built microphone in your MacBook Pro or iMac. 

Click here for more details on Mountain Lions Dictation, the audio of the announcement and our thoughts on where this will lead on our main blog.

Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will be available in July 2012 for AU$20.99.