The Tips - Mac Kung Fu - page 13

6. The voice will now be downloaded and installed, although be aware that

it's almost half a gigabyte in size so might take some time to come down
the line. Once it's finished, select it within the System Voice drop-down
list within System Preferences.

Testing the New Voice
You can test the new voice within Safari or TextEdit by highlighting a para-
graph of text and then clicking Edit→Speech→Start Speaking. Note that it
takes a few seconds for Speech to start the first time you use it, and you
might have to quit and restart the app in question for the new voice to start
working. See also Tip 290, Make Your Mac Speak , on page 310 .

Under the Dictation & Speech heading of System Preferences, you can activate
other spoken helpers, such as speaking dialog boxes when they appear. These
are primarily designed to help the partially sighted or blind, but they can be
fun to play around with!

If you get tired of the Siri voice, you can switch to any of the other voices
using the System Voice drop-down list, as described earlier. The default voice
is Alex.

Tip 5

Supertip: Dictate Like a Pro

OS X Mountain Lion includes speech recognition, which you can activate by
opening System Preferences (Apple menu→System Preferences), selecting
Dictation & Speech, and clicking the On radio button on the Dictation tab.

Using it is very simple—just tap the FN key twice (or one of the CONTROL keys if
you're using a full-sized external keyboard) and then speak. Double-tap the
key again when you've finished.

Specifying Capital Letters, Spacing, and Line Breaks
Here's how to specify capitalization when dictating:

• Capitalizing a word: Say “cap” before the word you to capitalize. For
example, to enter the phrase “We should all read the good Book,” you
would say, “We should all read the good cap Book.”