Recently, I start to work on setting up a computer for Joe with voice2text, text2voice and voice command functions. Here is a note on how to turn on and use those functions on a mac.
To use voice control, go to “System Preferences”, then click “Accessibility” and then click “Voice Control“, where you will find options to turn on and adjust the voice control.
To dictate voice to text, simply turn on the voice control as stated above. Further more, there are a set of key words, which are quite intuitive in fact such as “open/quit [An APP]” , that the voice control will regognize them as command and it treats often correctly the rest as text input. Dictation works well in Keynote and Pages, while it might not work in Microsoft Office, which needs to be tested out.
To convert text to voice, go to “System Preferences”, then click “Accessibility” and then click “Spoken Content“, where you will find options to turn on and adjust the text2voice function, for example, you can choose the option to always show the Spoken Content Player. You can then select/highlight what ever text and ask (by click Option+Esc key, or click on the play button on the Spoken Content Player control) the computer to read it out.
To request the computer to read out the whole screen, go to “System Preferences”, then click “Accessibility” and then click “VoiceOver“, which will do just that. However, if you have dictation/voice control on while using VoiceOver, the voice from VoiceOver will be recorded and treated as command or text.
How to apply those functions? For example, you can select contents of emails, and convert them into voice. You may reply emails or write articles via voice2text.
In addition, one may turn on Siri, which have both the voice control function and much more.
Basically, Joe wants to be able to use email, browser, word processing, slides, and occationaly Cmaptools (maybe http://Lynkage.cn is easier to use?). For those, with the above text2voice, voice2text and voice control, it should be more or less enough. So it seems that Joe will not need additional hardwares and softwares for this, besides simply a mac with M1 chip (without the chip, it seems that voice2text will have to be run on the Apple server and thus limited).