I’m posting this as a service to the wider community, based on my recent experiences attempting to use Voice Control on Mac as a result of losing the use of my hand due to surgery. For reference, it’s in response to this acknowledged problem with Mac OS systems where, often after an upgrade a bug is introduced that renders Voice Control unusable owing to an error involving the downloading of language files. Having tried all of the prescribed fixes (which no one seems to have found entirely effective), I came across a solution, and one reason I’m posting it here is that the forum thread is closed to responses.
I came across the fix when someone, hearing I had hand surgery, inadvertently suggested I use Siri (which I’ve never used and frankly don’t have use for). However, under the impression that perhaps I could use Siri as a backdoor solution, I happened across a rather magic “fix” which isn’t a fix but rather pointed me in the direction of the Dictation feature in Mac, which I found on this page. Basically: Choose Apple menu () > System Preferences and click on the Keyboard icon and choose the Dictation option (as opposed to the Voice Control option in the Accessibility section)…and sure enough, I could finally activate the option of having voice-to-text successfully. The best part? You don’t even need Siri for this feature (thank god).
It took me many (many) hours to find this fix, so I thought I’d post this so that anyone else having a similar issue will be able to (hopefully) have a way to enable this.
On this note, I have to say that doing client notes with voice-to-text is rather a godsend; not only for my temporary one-handedness, but I actually found dictating my notes verbally was both easier and faster than typing from memory. It could just be a me-thing, but somehow typing my notes from memory requires more effort (mentally) than just openly talking about them via a microphone. I may very well switch to this in the future, semi-permanently, however I’m just happy that I managed to find a solution to this annoying bug.
As someone who has been part of the online tech community since the 90s (Microsoft, Linux, and now Mac), I believe in the value of giving back to the community and I hope that by posting this I can relieve someone of the burden of Apple’s inability to render a fix for this, especially given the circumstances under which someone might need to access this sort of tool.
P.S. The cast was removed from my hand and I’m in the process of doing some intense physiotherapy (literally every two hours I’m supposed to do this), which has allowed me to type two-handedly once more. I’m very thankful for the care I’ve received at St. Michael’s Hospital over the last week. It’s been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster, which I imagine I will write about here sometime soon.
