Restricting Mountain Lion dictation

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

In case anyone is curious, it seems the key to disabling the Mountain Lion dictation function is stored in a com.apple.ironwood.support.plist.

The settings are

Domain:         com.apple.ironwood.support
Apply To:       User Level Enforced
Key Name:       Ironwood Allowed
Type:           boolean
Value:          false

This grays out the On/Off radio buttons and the shortcut menus, but allows the Text to Speech tab in Dictation & Speech to be fully used.
And yes, its "Ironwood Allowed" with the space in it. First time I recall seeing a space in an MCX key. That may be a new ML thing.
I'm not sure if it can be set to System Level Enforced, but I'm thinking this is held in the user domain so probably not.

I only researched this as an "in case" We're not sure if we'll actually use it. Just that 10.8's dictation feature sends your words to Apple's servers for transcribing to text, like Siri, so some security conscious environments might freak over that.

Slightly OT - Not sure why its "com.apple.ironwood". Anyone know why that would be? Maybe the company that created iOS' dictation?

4 REPLIES 4

jarednichols
Honored Contributor
Slightly OT - Not sure why its "com.apple.ironwood". Anyone know why that would be? Maybe the company that created iOS' dictation?

I thought Siri was the company and product and Nuance is the dictation engine (though it's never been confirmed) so I'm not sure where Ironwood comes from. I'm going to speculate on an internal Apple code name of some sort.

jcompton
Contributor

This entry should be updated. Changed in 10.8.2

Domain: com.apple.assistant.support
Key Name: Dictation Enabled
Type: boolean
Value: false

However - MCX and/or Profile does not seem to work user level or computer level.

krusej23
New Contributor

How are you pushing this setting out? We have a student that we upgraded to 10.8 specifically for Dictation and Dictation keeps getting disabled. None of our managed preferences are disabling Dictation. Any help? Thanks!

JayDuff
Contributor II

This must have changed again, as com.apple.assistant.support is nowhere to be found in 10.11.6.