How does Mountain Lion's voice control compare to Siri?

My father is of the generation that dictated a lot of stuff, and he's understandably infatuated with Siri on the iPhone he recently got. I understand that ML has baked-in voice controls, but I also know Apple isn't using the name "Siri" for them. For people here who get ML, how do its voice controls compare to ML? I'm thinking of encouraging my dad to get ML on both his home machine (MBP 17) and work machine (iMac 27).

 

Its nothing like Siri

The voice "controls" are the same as they've been in all previous OSX versions.

The new voice feature is just dictation. Anywhere you can type in, you can talk and have it enter the words for you, nothing more.

 

Gotcha. That's actually what he wants--to be able to dictate text the way he dictates emails on his phone. So I'll recommend it for him. He's less interested in the natural language "banter" or commands that some people do with Siri.

 

Seeing as how he will have to buy it once and can install it on multiple systems, I don't see a reason why he shouldn't upgrade. I haven't upgraded myself simply because I am waiting for the weekend incase anything goes wrong (I doubt it will). I am almost tempted to reformat my MBA and start from scratch but the idea of setting up Windows 7 again through Parallels 7 doesn't thrill me (though I have been thinking about switching back to Windows XP for my VM since I am not using anything exclusive to Win 7 and XP has a much, much smaller footprint).

 

After reading Engadget's and The Verge's review, I'm seriously thinking about upgrading my MBP 15 as well. Not for the voice controls, but for the improvements to Safari, overall performance, and security. At $19.99, it's sort of a "meh, why not" decision, even though the MBP 15 isn't my primary laptop anymore.

 

That's mainly why I downloaded it. I was going to hold off until a few updates came out (maybe 10.8.1-10.8.2) as I really didn't see anything outstanding in Mountain Lion that I did want and I originally thought that AirPlay mirroring would be the same experience as it is on the iPad 2 and iPad 3 (useful in a bind but lags too much for anything else). However, AirPlay mirroring seems to have only a small amount of lag but is smooth and works great. To me, that alone is worth the $20 upgrade fee.

 

I will say that ML is definitely a great upgrade, it's so much more than being just crammed with iOS features...which by the way is a BIG WELCOME in terms of productivity with my iOS devices. More importantly is the performance gain, much quicker responses and fluid operation. Worth much more than $20.....so how can anyone go wrong paying $20 for this? Hardly anything decent is purchasable with only $20 in this economy.

BTW, Can someone please tell me what happened to the Forum Jump Button? The only way to get back to the threads list seems to be clicking the Quick Navigation drop down box and scrolling back to the Apple section every time. Help?

 

who knows.. this forum theme is utter trash... its horrid looking, hard to read and many things don't even line up correctly. I cannot believe they did an update without making and testing a decent theme first before going live.

 

if you set your forum style to vb4 default style, it becomes MUCH easier to deal with and navigation goes back to reasonably simple. give the programmers some time to sort out this upgrading mess.

 

I 1000% agree with you word for word. I don't know why they changed what was already good into something complicated?

 

Please stay on topic. But as mentioned before, the dictation function is for converting speech to text only. It is quite accurate, depending on your accent.

 

I haven't tried it myself, but it sounds like Siri-technology without the Siri brandname and the smart feedback. Meaning that the translation of your voice to text happens in the cloud and not locally on your machine, and that it can use your address book to understand words like 'sis' and 'dad'. It also only supports English as well as a few other major languages.

Here's a quote from what John Siracusa from ArsTechnica had to say about it:

 

Yes, it does in fact work exactly like Siri but without the personal assistant. I have to agree with Budding, surprisingly it's very accurate. I'm sitting here on my iMac using it and the iMac's built in mic picks up very well and any mistakes are so minimal I can pretty much trust using dictation with my eyes closed. Siri isn't even this accurate unless I hold the phone to my ear.

 

iOS devices have the same exact dictation on them... even ones that don't have Siri. Its just standard dictation, I'm not sure why anyone would compare it to Siri... just compare it to iOS dictation which is the same thing and works the same way.

 

It is a little disappointing that Apple makes Macs rely on their servers for voice dictation needs but the update is appreciated. I'm actually digging the other updates that Mountain Lion is bringing over dictation especially since I am not always connected to the internet. The notifications area was sorely needed. I received my first notification of an OS X updated today. Instead of the Software Update service randomly starting and telling me there was an update, I received an easily dismissible notification that is still tucked away for future reading.

AirPlay display mirroring works pretty well. Not enough for gaming but it does work for general browsing and it allows me to finally have my MBA at my side, with the lid open (for proper ventilation) so that I can use my HDTV as a monitor as if my MBA was plugged into it via HDMI. There is a small amount of lag between the MBA's display and my HDTV, I would say it is about 0.4 seconds. Mountain Lion actually delays audio output from the Apple TV so that it syncs up with the AirPlay display and not video content on the Mac. It's a nice touch and works a lot better than on the iPad 2/3.

The updated dock also looks much better. I like having a solid, gradient dock at the bottom instead of it being translucent. I think the new one looks classier and is much more reminiscent of the iOS bottom app dock. Now I'm just waiting for Apple to integrate Twitter and facebook into Mountain Lion and it will be an all around much better package. Boot times for me, compared to Lion (which was pre-installed on my MBA) have been reduced by 2 seconds and it appears that Mountain Lion has a smaller footprint than Lion. My MBA's internal SSD had 5.2 GB more free space after Mountain Lion's installation. The ML installation file was about 4.3 GB so it appears that ML takes up about 1GB less space than Lion. All-in-all, it is definitely worth the $20 upgrade fee. It honestly feels like the upgrade that Lion should have been. I enjoyed Lion but ML takes it to another level with more small and major updates. Safari is also a competitive browser under ML.

 

Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
This is a test of the new Mac OS system.
I'm not sure that it works if you go over 30 seconds. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't.
This is the end.

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No dictation: Pretty accurate...much more so than Siri is. OS X ML does use the cloud. I suspect that it is using the voice recognition that will be used in the Siri update that comes with IOS6, because there is no way Siri can handle "Rubber baby buggy bumpers." My wife is so thoroughly disgusted with Siri that she would delete it if she could and if she ever meets the woman who provides the voice I fear she will beat her senseless on principle alone.

 

Got ML. Haven't tried the dictation, but in general, it seems more polished and refined than Snow Leopard is.