Mac Voice Recognition Headsets
Shopping for the best Mac headset with mic for your Apple dictation and speech recognition needs? Both single-ear mono, and dual driver stereo headsets with boom microphones are available.
Single-Ear Ultra-Lightweight
Mono headsets are often preferred by business users who must also manage phone calls and converse with coworkers. Dual-ear binaural models might be preferred by those who do more than just speech recognition. They might also want full-range stereo music and other computer audio playback capabilities as well.
- USB Wired Headset For Mac
- RF Wireless Headset For Mac
- Bluetooth Headset For Mac
- Analog Headsets For Mac
- USB-C Headsets For New Macs
Apple Compatible USB Headsets
USB connected headsets provide Macintosh dictation users a straight-forward, reliable and robust connection delivering pristine, pure digital voice capture and audio playback from a single USB cable.
Noise-Cancelling Boom Mic
Sennheiser Wideband USB Headset
Optimized For Mac Speech And VOIP
The UAC - USB Audio Class device drivers built into MacOS make USB speech recognition headsets with mic instantly usable without needing to install any software. Simply select the device in Apple's System Preferences > Sound pane.
Apple Compatible Wireless Headsets
Some of the limitations of Bluetooth initially made wireless Bluetooth headsets less than ideal for voice recognition tasks. Instead, RF Radio-Frequency based wireless headsets are often the preferred choice. Free from the tangle of wires and supporting far greater operating range than Bluetooth, it's better suited for voice recognition needs. The higher bandwidth of an RF signal also meant NO compression of the audio signal is needed - ideal for accurate dictation sessions. They ship with a dedicated USB RF receiver dongle to communicate with the headset.
Optimized For Speech Recognition
Apple Compatible Bluetooth Headsets
In much of the early computer speech recognition era, Bluetooth headsets were NOT RECOMMENDED nor bundled with voice control sofware for technical reasons. In the Bluetooth 1.x and 2.x era the voice compression codecs used to compress the audio signal were optimized only for cell-phone calls. Bluetooth's limited bandwidth and these codecs were just not sufficient to properly reproduce the full-frequency nuances of speech that are needed for accurate dictation. The limited 10 meter (30 feet - and usually far less) Bluetooth transmission range is another limiting factor. Bluetooth still doesnt' give much freedom to roam before signal breakup / dropoff occur. Susceptibility to elecronic interference from nearby gadgets is another gotcha that makes it less than ideal.
Creative Labs Premium Audio Quality
However, the arrival of Bluetooth 4.0 introduced smarter, extended frequency HD audio codecs that didn't throw away critical bits of data essential speech recognition needs. These high-definition or wideband HD Bluetooth audio codecs can now allow a much cleaner and higher resolution digital waveform to capture the subtleties of spoken word accurately. Indeed Dragon had begun offering special software / hardware bundles of Dragon Dictate for Mac that include a HD Bluetooth headset - an indication of their willingness to support using a HD Bluetooth headset for speech recognition for the first time.
Apple Compatible 4-Pole TRRS Analog Headsets
Traditionally, 1/8" 3.5mm analog headsets have been rather problematic and confusing on the Macintosh platform for several reasons. For many years Apple used non-standard Line-Level microphone input voltages that were incompatible with the vast majority of Windows PC headsets and microphones that are/were available. Secondly, on many Macintosh computers Apple eschewed the standard PC practice of having 2 separate audio jacks: One for a 2-pole mono microphone input and another for a 3-pole stereo headset output - and combined them into one.
Analog Headset With Boom Mic
In recent years and largely spurred by the advancing iPhone & iPad, Apple started leaning towards a FOUR-POLE unifying 1/8" 3.5mm TRRS plug so that iPhone earbuds could have inline microphone support for IOS devices. They've since adopted this CTIA standard TRRS 4-pole jack on all more recent MacBooks and Mac desktops. For those who don't want a bulky over-the-head unit, 4-Pole analog mic headsets allow the option of a minimal, earbud style.
