James Nuttall Blog

I would like to introduce you to my new book, Successfully Control Your iPad With Your Voice. I personally use voice control with my iPad and my iPhone most of the time. This is because 15 years ago I was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). I can no longer walk and only have about 10% of the use of my arms and hands. So I am very grateful that Apple has the Accessibility feature Voice Control.

Voice Control allows me to operate my iPhone or iPad 99% of the time with my voice. Voice commands replace most of the tap and swipe gestures that most people use to control their devices. Additionally, I dictate my email, text messages, and documents like this blog using Voice Control. 

To open Voice Control for the first time you can give the command, Hey Siri Open Voice Control. Several files will be downloaded to your device so that Voice Control can operate. The download only happens once.

Perhaps, one of the best commands to remember for Voice Control is, Show Commands. This will bring up a list of the voice commands to be used with Voice Control. Two important commands that quickly turn Voice Control on and off are, Go To Sleep  and, Wake Up.

Let me focus on dictation for a moment. Fortunately, Apple has introduced a new dictation module with iOS and iPadOS 17. This new dictation module is built on artificial intelligence (AI). This module’s accuracy is greatly improved over past dictation models. I dictate my books and my blog posts using Voice Control dictation. Beside great dictation, Voice Control has many voice commands that help you control dictation.

One of the easiest ways to dictate on my iPad or iPhone is to go to settings and tap General and then turn on Enable Dictation. This will place a microphone key just left of the spacebar on your on-screen keyboard. When you tap on this microphone key, Siri dictation is turned on. Simply speak what you would like to type and your words will appear on the screen. To turn off dictation simply tap the microphone key again and dictation will be stopped. Also you will want to turn off Voice Control before dictating with Siri dictation, otherwise there will be interference between the two dictation modules

The style of my book is written like one friend explaining and showing Voice Control to you and not so much like a technical computer manual. I certainly walk you through the many aspects and uses of Voice Control. But in a style that is easily comprehended. 

It takes a while to master Voice Control since dictation and voice commands require a bit of learning and practice. But I believe in the end it is well worth your time and effort.

# posted by James Nuttall @ 5:10 PM