Following on from the inclusion of Siri on the iPhone 4S and voice dictation on the new iPad, Apple could be considering adding voice dictation to the Mac. A discovery, made by 9to5Mac, seems to show a new dictation command that has been noted in the Developer Preview of the next Mac operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The command that the user would use to start the dictation is holding both CMD keys on the keyboard simultaneously.
The new command is not active in the current Developer seed of Mountain Lion, rather the keyboard shortcut shows up in a Safari resources file in the Mountain Lion OS. It is required because, unlike the screen based keyboards in iOS devices, there is no microphone key on an Apple keyboard. What is unclear at the moment is if this is a command that will be activated in the public release of Mountain Lion since this is apparently the only evidence thus far of dictation in the Mac.
It also raises another interesting point of whether Apple will be including greatly upgraded microphones in the next iteration of the Mac line up. Certainly, a microphone integrated into the keyboard of an iMac could be a lot more sensitive than the one integrated into the screen of the iMac. Additionally, it’s not clear if it is just dictation that would be coming to the Mac or if Apple are working on bringing Siri to the Mac as well.
With a more extensive demonstration of the capabilities of 10.8 Mountain Lion expected at the WWDC conference in June, we won’t have long to wait.
Commanding…