Editing PlainTalk (section)

===Speech recognition===
Apple hired many speech recognition researchers in 1990. After about a year, they demonstrated a technology codenamed Casper. It was released as part of the PlainTalk package in 1993. Although available for all PowerPC Macintoshes and AV 68k machines (it was one of the few applications that made use of the [[Digital signal processor|DSP]] in the [[Macintosh Quadra 660AV|Centris 660AV]] and [[Macintosh Quadra 840AV|Quadra 840AV]]), it was not part of the default system install prior to Mac OS X, requiring the user to perform a custom OS installation to get speech recognition capabilities.

In [[Mac OS X Lion|Mac OS X 10.7 Lion]] and earlier, Apple's speech recognition was voice-command oriented only, i.e. not intended for dictation. It can be configured to listen for commands when a hot key is pressed, after being addressed with an activation phrase such as "Computer", or "Macintosh", or without prompt. A graphical status monitor, often in the form of an animated character, provides visual and textual feedback about listening status, available commands and actions. It can also communicate back with the user using speech synthesis.

Early versions of the speech recognition provided full access to the menus. This support was later removed, since it required too many resources and made recognition less reliable, only to be re-added in Mac OS X 10.3 as a "universal access technology" called spoken user interface.

The user can launch items located in a special folder, called "Speakable Items", simply by speaking their name (while the system is in ''listening'' mode). Apple shipped a number of [[AppleScript]]s in this folder, but [[Alias (Mac OS)|aliases]], [[document]]s and [[folder (computing)|folders]] can be opened in the same way.

Additional functionality is provided by individual applications. An [[application programming interface]] lets programs define and modify an available [[vocabulary]]. For example, the [[Macintosh Finder|Finder]] provides a vocabulary for manipulating [[computer file|files]] and [[window (computing)|windows]].

In [[OS X Mountain Lion|OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion]], Apple introduced "Dictation",<ref>{{cite web|url=http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5449 |title=Use your voice to enter text on your Mac - Apple Support |website=Support.apple.com |date=2016-04-05 |access-date=2016-04-27}}</ref> intended for general text. Originally, it required the sending of audio data to Apple servers for processing. In [[OS X Mavericks|OS X 10.9 Mavericks]], Apple added the option to download support for dictation without an Internet connection. As of OS X 10.9.3, eight languages (19 dialects) are supported.