Dictation - speech to text

I would like to dictated (speech to text) using the Mac OS dictation feature. It works in a lot of places and applications in Mac OS but not obsidian. Is there a special way to get this to work ?

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try double tapping the [fn] key?

Speech-to-text works in other apps but not obsidian. The double on [fn] did not do it. I have also tried different shortcuts from the system prefs > keyboard > dictation.

strange, when i do that i get dictation in obsidian just fine :thinking:

I have added obsidian in the system preferences -> Security & Privacy ->Privacy ->accessebility.

There is this other setting for speech where I dont see any applications listed. Could this still be a privacy issue ? I cannot manually add applications here.

Hello - same issue here. It works around 10% of the time in Obsidian and 100% of the time everywhere else.

90% of the time the computer seems to lag and nothing happens. The 10% is often when I have just started Obsidian and use dictation for the first time.

Have a great day

I’m currently using Otter.ai and I’m super happy with the quality of speech-to-text. I know nothing about coding of plugins but could it be possible to automatically upload audio notes in obsidian to otter.ai to get the speech-to-text back ?

There hasn’t been any activity for 5 days, could you please see if you’d like to pick any of the existing answers as the solution, or do you still need help with something?

Would appreciate it if you could clarify on that, thanks!

I’m having this same issue! Not sure what the fix is.

Here the same issue… Like Enathen: It works around 10% of the time in Obsidian and 100% of the time everywhere else. 90% of the time the computer seems to lag and nothing happens. The 10% is often when I have just started Obsidian and use dictation for the first time.

Question: How many of you guys with that problem do have a M1 Chip? Is there a connection?

I’ve encounted the same issue as above in Monterey 12.3.01 and Obsidian Version 0.14.6. Once dicatation is turned on, after working once or twice in Obsidian, dictation ceases to work. I hear the sound to begin speaking, but nothing is dictated.

I am just wondering if there is any solution to this issue yet?

For some reason it has suddently started working

I believe that it should be very strait-forward to create a plugin that allows speech input using the chromium API.
It’s just a little bit of code. See an example here, showing view source: Chrome Browser

I haven’t looked too deeply, but if anyone sets this up, I would be incredibly excited—it should be higher quality than mac input also.
The ideal interface is what I’ve seen in Voice In Voice Typing - Chrome Web Store — just having a single keyboard shortcut to toggle voice input on and off. So you can keep it going all of the time as you are thinking or in conversation, and instantly toggle off as needed, e.g. if someone comes in the room.

My hope is that this would only take an hour or a few to make into a very basic plugin that would make Obsidian far more accessible in a cross-platform manner!

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is this possible yet?

Have you tried using voice control rather than dictation? It’s under Accessibility->Voice Control. It doesn’t work as well in obsidian as elsewhere in macOS, but it gets me most of the way there. I use a hybrid approach, part Voice control, part typing. It still works out faster than my best touch typing, most of the time. I’ve still been looking for better alternatives though. Compared to the newer AI Voice to text models, Apple’s Voice Control is pretty dumb.

This is how I did it in ventura:
Settings → Keyboard → Dictation
Turned on the options and selected a shortcut key. But I had to restart Obsidian, and try it outside before Obsidian started to pick it up.

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I use T2S with Google Speech Services enabled. It’s free, but it seems like there should be a way to incorporate that in Obsidian and still be free, although I don’t know how. But using my Windows 11 machine (which runs Android Apps) I can hear it in real time, and also click and edit what I don’t want without having to switch views or anything. I typically copy and paste from Obsidian, listen through the material and edit, and then paste it back into Obsidian. It would be better though if Obsidian could use it direct on Windows and in the App.