MBP, Sequoia 15.5.
Setting a dictation language also changes the keyboard. When I use F5 to start dictation I can click on EN (see pic below) and change to another language. If I don’t, the dictated text is unusable. But this also changes the keyboard settings, but the hardware is obviously NOT changing, I want to continue to type and amend my text with what my MBP has.
What am I doing wrong?
Could you explain exactly what languages you are trying to switch between? Are you dictating in English but then want to type in German or something and don’t get the right keys?
British keyboard, I dictate e.g. in German. The dictation result is good, but maybe not perfect, when I amend the dictated text I realise that my actual QWERTY was switched to QWERTZ and this German keyboard also has Umlauts where I expect [ ] { } \
Switching back is possible, but doing this in every sentence, just because I need to amend my text is a pain.
So you want to dictate German and then compose German with the English qwerty layout, right?
I see I only have Sonoma available at the moment, and this seems to work ok. Does the behavior you see occur in all apps? I will try to check Sequoia later.
Might it be easier using keyboard shortcuts? There are (disabled on my system) shortcuts to select the previous input source (Ctrl-space) and to select the next source in the input menu (Ctrl-Opt-space):
Apple MAIL, PAGES and MS Word react identical. Last year I used to dictate in Sonoma, the problem didn’t exist then, but my memory may fail me on this.
Apple explains here how I can and apparently should change the input source (a strange word to use for keyboard layout). But I don’t want to change the keyboard layout, quite the opposite. Surely there must be many people who work in more than one language. Who would connect a different keyboard just because they need to dictate in another language? Such a fundamentally weird concept.
@Shamino I wanted to try out your suggestion, but as soon as I switch them on I get “used by another action”. How do I know which other action?
EDIT: I reset to “RESTORE Defaults” in above screenshot and can now use CTRL+Space to change the language. Bizarrely when I start from German abbreviated to DE) I briefly see “GB”, then the menu shows the microphone and “EN”.
Sounds as if language and country are mixed up.
I think they are just distinct. GB stands for the British input source (keyboard layout), which is slightly different from the US keyboard layout. EN is for the dictation language.
I don’t know why your shortcuts had the Command symbol in them, these have used Control for a number of years now.
Apple must have somehow thought that people dictating in German would usually also want to use the standard German keyboard mapping, and thus that switching to this automatically could be a useful “feature”. You can let them know otherwise via their feedback channels.
CMD-Space and CMD-OPT-Space are used by Spotlight/search services. I’m surprised your system has those keys assigned that way, unless you (or some app) changed them in the past.
Glad to hear that worked.
No idea though why the shortcut was set differently.
The fact that the keyboard layout changes when only the language should be switched is still a problem and has an impact on fluent working.
Apple was for so many years so well ahead of others when it came to language support, I wonder why they can’t be a bit more logical. They did remind us of “flags are not languages” a while ago, but now this.
