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Trick OS X Mountain Lion’s Dictation into Learning New Words by Adding Fake Contacts


When Mountain Lion launched, we discussed how to use its new Dictaction feature effectively. It works pretty well on its own, but reader MDaemon wrote in with a handy tip: if you're having trouble getting Dictation to understand words you use often, just create a fake contact for it—since the tool scans your contacts to make sure it gets proper nouns right, it'll see your contact, match your word with the contact, and print it correctly.

MDaemon notes that Dictation will assume the word is a proper noun, so expect to be capitalized, but it's a great tip nonetheless, especially if the words you're having trouble with are technical terms or proper nouns anyway, like product names, company names, or words in other languages. I tested it out and it works like a charm—one way you can keep your fake conatcts from cluttering up your real ones is to create a contact group specifically for Dictation words, that way you won't have to scroll through your custom speech-to-text dictionary every time you want to email or call someone. Have you been using Dictation in Mountain Lion? Any other tips to share? Let us know in the discussions below.

Thanks to MDaemon for sending in the tip!