Dictation not responding on MacBook Pro

If you’re having issues with diction, try this quick fix that worked for me:

1. Open Terminal.

2. Run:

killall corespeechd

This stops and restarts the corespeechd process, which immediately resolved my problem. Give it a shot if you’re facing similar issues!

Hello All. I had this issue. What I discovered was that to the left of the dictation screen there is a microphone icon (which I wasn't aware of as being something I could toggle). I had to select the carrot i.e. the arrow, and change the selection from Aggregate Device, to Internal Microphone, the it started picking up my voice. See pic.

[Edited by Moderator]

I have just read through this thread and what worked for me was to:

Open Keyboard settings

Select the dictation language and check English UK, English Canada and English Australian.

It now works like a charm.

I went back to just English UK and it didn't work any more.

So I went back to checking all 3 and it's fine. Very curious!!

Hope this helps someone. :)

In case you've got Webroot Secure Anywhere running in the background...

1 Click the Webroot SecureAnywhere icon in the menu bar.

2 Choose Pause Secure Keyboard Entry.

3 Retry Dictation

This worked for me so not sure if this would cover your issues.

Apple Support Article

Let me tell you what I did to get mine to work. I am running OS 15.1 and I would bet my bottom dollar that Apple Intelligence is the culprit in this whole thread for those with an M1 computer running Sequoia 15.1

I could not uncheck the box for English US under language for dictation. It would just recheck itself. So I changed the language and region to the United Kingdom. I restarted my computer, and then I had to tweak things like the first day of the week, date format, number format, et cetera to match the United States. My only problem is that you cannot change the currency to the US dollar. You can find language and regions under the general setting.

That's not only made dictation start working but also Siri which was not working for me using Apple Intelligence. But since AI is not available in the UK it does not apply to my computer now. And yes I tried turning it off before but it still would not let me uncheck the US language under Dictation. I will try resetting it back to US when they finally do another update. There's a reason they say Apple Intelligence is beta on the MacBook pro.

But the fact that I got dictation back is worth anything and everything. In fact I wrote this entire post using dictation. Good luck on finding the cure for yours.

I’m sorry to hear yours is not working, mine worked fluently whenever I did what I read. Which was, go to dictation, and then click off of click on English onto some other language and hit apply, close it, and then go back in dictation, click on English, and then hit apply. When activating the dictation, you have to double click your function “fn” button. My little mic at the top of my keyboard does not work with dictation, but the old way, double clicking, works!

I was in the same boat that you were. I had made all of the necessary changes. I am running an MXL condenser microphone into an ADA8000 ADAT expansion interface into my RME Digi Face USB.

So here I am running, probably a slightly more complicated signal chain than most people, which is why for a few moments I was guessing that I was going to have to get a dedicated USB driven microphone only for being able to do dictations.

Because even though I could see signal metering in the "Sound" settings window in the System Settings, I was not able to get the dictate function to work at all. Probably spent about two hours trying to track down what the issue was until I came across this thread, and I read the comment where the dude said that all he had to do was actually restart the computer after he made all of the setting changes that he needed to make. I am here to tell you that I did that exact same thing and voilà, I am dictating this very message!

I suppose the thing that I would add to this thread is that this was happening on a 2020 M1 chip Mac mini. So hopefully this becomes searchable for anyone who has the same issue on their Mac mini.

I, too, was having an issue where all settings were configured correctly. I'd press my keyboard shortcut for dictation (in my case, the F5 mic icon on the MacBook Air), and the microphone would show up as if it was ready to record, but then it wouldn't do anything. I turned the dictation feature on and off, which didn't help. Then I restarted my computer and it spontaneously started working without me changing any settings. It's frustrating that that was the fix, considering I must have turned my computer off since I received it in November, but for some reason, that worked. I would definitely just try the good ole restart fix.

Thanks. I faced the same problem - the icon was showing up but doing nothing.

Restarting the Mac fixed the problem. The rest of this was written by dictating it out to the Mac.

What I found really cool was that you can type as well as dictate in case something is not correctly interpreted you can manually fix with the keyboard. You can mix the keyboard and mic, which works quite well.The only issue I found was that the cursor disappeared and I've not figured out how to tell it to delete a word.

I had the same issue. What ended up working for me was selecting a different language, for example Canadian English or German. The dictation would work in those languages. Interestingly, if I then changed it back to US English, it also worked again.

Hopefully, it works for you as well.

Yeeeeees!!!! Just check marking on a different language in "DICTATION" and clicking back to United States, worked for me like magic! Just go to keyboard in your settings and in the keyboard settings, checkmark a different language, then uncheck English, then uncheck the other and recheck English. I never did hit apply. Thanks @rgb2cmyk_ this was driving me, nuts!

Go to dictation, and then click off English onto some other language and hit apply, close it, and then go back in dictation, click on English, and then hit apply. When activating the dictation, I have to double click your function “fn” button. My little mic at the top of my keyboard does not work with dictation, but the old way, double clicking, works!

Hi, I was having the same issue with my MacBook Pro 13-inch, M1, 2020, and I found out that every time I was using dictation and switching to either Safari on privacy mode or Opera using VPN, dictation will stop responding, the only workaround that I found in my case was to go to settings search for Dictation and toggle the switch on and off. I left the setting window open. If Dictation stop responding I will do the same thing again toggle the dictation switch on and off. It is an annoying solution but so far is working.

Run in Terminal:

pkill -f com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore.speechrecognitiond
pkill -f com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore.brokerd

Restart your computer.

I just turned on Dictation for the first time ever, and it did not work. Very anti-climactic. Luckily, I come from your Windows background, so I used this knowledge to determine that restarting my computer was the best course of action. And would you look at that.

I even wrote most of this with Dictation! I didn't realize that it includes grammar for the most part, too. That's pretty cool.