Talking To Your Mac: The Coolest Feature of Mountain Lion, and the Future of Computers

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Mountain Lion, the next big software cat for your Mac, has a gazillion new features. Too abounding to name, and frankly, to affliction about. But there's one you should pay absorption to, because it ability change all of computing.


Talking To Your Mac: The Coolest Feature of Mountain Lion, and the Future of Computers
Apple OS X Mountain Lion Gold Master Is OutApple OS X Mountain Lion Gold Master Is OutApple OS X Mountain Lion Gold Master Is Out

The Gold Master adaptation of Apple's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is now accessible on the OS X Dev…Read moreRead on


Dictation is one of the a lot of aboveboard new locations of OS X Mountain Lion—so simple that it's simple to overlook. All you do is double-tap a button, alpha talking wherever you'd type, and your computer fills in the words you speak. It's a arch backup for the aggregate of accidental accounting that fills up our acquainted hours. And it's fast!—you absolutely feel like you've got an alert secretary ashore about in that tiny aluminum chassis. Apple says Dictation will even acclimate to your articulation over time, authoritative it added authentic and attuned the added you break through it. Neat.


It's not Siri—it's congenital on the aforementioned articulation acceptance technology, but it will not acknowledgment questions for you. Just as well, aback Siri doesn't absolutely plan above acknowledging Zooey Deschanel's acceptance in rain. But it could still be just as big as any digitized articulation that spits aback factoids and Starbucks directions. This could be Apple's aboriginal abundant ache at killing the keyboard for good.


All of the signs are here. Mountain Lion folds in iOS appearance to the desktop mix—interlocking a notification center, administration buttons, and iCloud just mimics what we've been accomplishing on our phones and iPads. These are devices, don't forget, that abridgement keyboards. Instead, we accept to use our fingers on a basic keyboard, which works appealing able-bodied on a phone, but sort-of-kinda-fine on an iPad. It's the acumen cipher is anytime traveling to address annihilation absolute on a tablet. Your fingers on that bottle just don't cut it. But you apperceive what's worse than a fine-at-best basic keyboard? Plugging in an absolute keyboard. A above allotment of the tablet's aflame address is its simplicity—everything you charge is awash into that aluminum plane, after the charge for peripherals.


But if iOS and avidity and affecting and annexation and wiping are the future of computers, how do we blazon our way out of the keyboard necessity? We don't—we allocution our way out of it.



Talking To Your Mac: The Coolest Feature of Mountain Lion, and the Future of Computers

"Talking is the new typing," Apple declares in the account of Mountain Lion's new features. This is marketing, sure, but it's got chewy $.25 of accuracy in it, too. If the tech we use with our adaptable accessories and the tech we adulation about our laptops and desktops will anytime merge, Apple needs us to get acclimated to talking to machines (and, eventually, TVs). Siri makes us a little afflictive still, and conceivably that's a action of her cluelessness. But for battlefront off tweets, bushing in comments, and afterlight Facebook? You can do all of this with a bifold tap of the Fn button to activate Dictation, and a third tap to conclude. Your Mac will action for a moment, and again bead the text—you can even say "exclamation point" or "comma" to add those in, although that's still a little wonky. But even with wonkiness, there's something array of admirable about not accepting to blow the keyboard.

It's added than just sloth: a keyboard feels like abstract for the hyper-short, hyper-quick way we bung argument about these days. And with so abundant of Apple's architecture accent placed on trackpad blow gestures already, your easily don't continued for the belletrist as abundant as you think. All this could alpha to rewire our accuracy abroad from a annex on a button bureaucracy from the 19th century, and against an adamant date with blow and allocution destiny.

Dictation still requires you to allocution a little like a 1990s cyborg, and it's boilerplate abreast authentic abundant for, say, autograph an commodity or a appellation paper. But it's a adolescent technology, and one that ability anon become able to accomplish agreement like "command + Q" or "CTRL + ALT + DELETE" feel as anachronistic and abroad as the things we formed them out on. So if Mountain Lion finds its way assimilate your arrangement this summer, accede double-tapping that Fn button and blubbering a little. Experiment—because the day Dictation goes from a accurate ambush to a accretion call could be afterpiece than you think.

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