How to use dictation in Mountain Lion

One of my favorite new features in OS X Mountain Lion isn’t reminders or Messages – they’re pretty awesome in their own right. Instead, I’ve been using the dictation and speech tool.

If you’re not familiar with this feature, what it does is it lets mac users speak to their mac – when composing emails, performing a Google search, writing a Microsoft Word document, sending and posting a status update in Facebook – among other applications.

To help you use dication in Mountain Lion, I’ve put together instructions along with a short video walking you through how to use dictation in Mountain Lion.

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50+ dictation shortcuts in OS X Mountain Lion

Dictation in Mountain LionDictation is an extremely powerful tool in OS X Mountain Lion. Not only can you use it to have your mac type the text that you speak, but it also works extremely well across many third-party apps such as Microsoft Word, Google, and even Facebook.

What this means is that instead of typing a status update on say Facebook, you can have your mac do it for you.

To help you get started using dictation in OS X Mountain Lion, I have compiled a list of 50+ dictation shortcuts in Mountain Lion that you can use to manipulate text, insert symbols, and use just your voice to compose documents, emails, status updates and more in OS X Mountain Lion.

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App of the day: Notability

Notability app for Apple iPadThose of you who have seen my office know that I take a lot of notes – at one point, they were on my computer, on my iPad, on papers from conferences and strewn across my desk. That was until I decided to get organized with my notes. If there is one thing that I find helps keep me organized, it’s having a great notes app – especially considering that I take my iPad. For some time, I’ve kept a handful of apps around for doing the standard task – one for sketching out ideas, another for recording voice memos (not just where I parked, but new ideas I thought about, along with notes from conferences I have attended). Unfortunately, having too many apps to essentially do the same thing – take notes – means there’s a lot of maintenance involved and so I wanted to simplify things.

Enter Notability app for iPad.

What I like about this app:

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