Speak your Calendar appointments to save typing them on the Mac

Siri in macOS enables you to perform all manner of tasks just by speaking to your Apple Mac, but did you know that you can speak your Calendar appointments in any version of OS X without Siri?

If you are running Mavericks, Yosemite, or El Capitan on the Mac, you can use speech recognition and create Calendar appointments by speaking them. This uses two features in OS X:

1. Dictation - the ability of OS X to turn speech into text
2. Calendar’s ability to understand natural language

Dictation and voice reciognition has been in OS X for many years, but some people still have not discovered how useful it can be, so here is a guide to show how it can be used with the Calendar app.

Set up Dictation & Speech

Go to the Apple menu and select System Preferences. Double click the Dictation & Speech icon in System Preferences.

Select the Dictation tab at the top. Set Dictation to On, and then select the shortcut you want to use to enable dictation. I am going to choose the Fn (Function) key, but you can choose one of the others if you prefer.

Create a Calendar event

Open the Calendar app and in the top left corner is a plus button. Click it to create a new event. A little panel opens ready for you to type in the event.

Dictate your appointment

Press the Fn key twice (or whatever key you defined as the shortcut) and the microphone icon appears next to the Create Quick Event box. Now just speak the event, such as “Meeting with Bob 10 AM Monday.

The Mac recognises your speech, turned it into text and enters it into the box.

Event options

Press Enter and you might see two options like this. The first has no location and with the second, Calendar has guessed that I want to meet Bob in Manchester. Click the one you want.

View the Calendar event

The event is created on the day and at the time you specified, and the details are displayed. You could edit this if you need to and invite people, add alerts or travel time and so on.

This is a very simple example of voice recognition on the Apple Mac. It can be useful at times and it saves you typing. Of course, Siri does a better job, but if you are running an older version of OS X, try this work-around.

View a Calendar event list

Here is a very quick tip for Calendar that has nothing to do with voice recognition, but is great on its own.

Type a full stop, period, or dot (whatever you want to call it) into the search box and hit Enter.

A panel on the left displays all upcoming events in a list. It’s like an agenda and is very useful.