Set up Vox with Apple Voice Control

Drive macOS with your voice, using Vox as the input.

Voice Control is Apple’s built-in system for operating the Mac by voice: clicking, scrolling, navigating, and dictating without touching anything. Vox gives it a much closer microphone than the built-in one, which matters because Voice Control listens continuously.

Voice Control and Vox dictation both want to transcribe what you say. Decide which one is doing it before you start, or you will get both.

Setting it up

1. Turn on Voice Control

   System Settings, then Accessibility, then Voice Control. Turn it on. The first time, macOS downloads a speech model.

2. Set Vox as the Voice Control microphone

   In the same panel, there is a microphone selector. Choose Vox. See Use Vox as a microphone anywhere.

3. Turn off Vox dictation

   See Use another dictation tool instead.

4. Optionally map a button to sleep and wake Voice Control

   Voice Control responds to “go to sleep” and “wake up”, and it has no default keyboard shortcut. macOS does not expose sleep and wake as a Shortcut action, so there is no Vox button mapping for this. Say “go to sleep” when you want Voice Control to stop listening; use the black button or the Vox app for Vox’s own power and connection controls.

Why the close microphone helps

Voice Control listens all the time, so it has to decide constantly whether what it heard was a command. A microphone close to your mouth gives it a much better signal against room noise, which cuts down on both missed commands and commands firing when someone else in the room was talking.

Useful commands to know

Say	Voice Control does
”Show numbers”	Labels every clickable thing with a number
”Click 12”	Clicks the item labelled 12
”Show grid”	Overlays a grid for precise positioning
”Scroll down”	Scrolls
”Go to sleep”	Stops listening until you say “wake up”

Voice Control commands vs Vox voice commands

They are separate systems and they do not know about each other. Vox commands are covered in Voice commands. If you are running Voice Control, use its command list rather than Vox’s, since only one of them should be transcribing at a time.

Troubleshooting

Voice Control does not list Vox as a microphone

Voice Control reads the device list at startup. Turn Voice Control off and on again with the device connected.

Commands fire when you did not mean them to

Say “go to sleep” when you are not actively driving the Mac. macOS does not expose Voice Control sleep as a Shortcut action, so use Voice Control’s own phrase rather than trying to map it to a Vox button.

Everything is being typed instead of run as commands

Voice Control is in dictation mode with a text field focused. Click away from the text field, or say “stop dictating”.