Let me start this out by saying I love Voice Control in MacOS Catalina. It has been a slight learning curve to get the voice commands down right but it works great. My issue is that it is causing my 2018 15" MacBook Pro to get hot. Pulling up Activity Monitor shows that com.apple.speechrecognition has the CPU % running between 30%-60%. Turning off Voice Control in the System Preferences immediately reduces this and allows the machine to cool down pretty fast. On its own that is not a lot but I also have to use Parallels for work purposes and it tends to be a CPU hog on its own so this thing really starts cooking with both running. A good bit of the time I put the Voice Control to sleep because of clients coming in and out of my office but even with it in sleep mode it seems to be using high CPU and mic icon is jumping at every sound it hears. My question are these: Is anyone else noticing this issue? How much of an issue is this? I know when my MacBook is working hard the CPUs will heat up and the fans will spin up but I am concerned about this over long periods of time. I would appreciate anyone else’s thoughts and input.
I noticed the same on my 2017 MacBook Air. I ended up downloading a Keyboard Maestro macro to toggle voice control on and off. I mostly use Voice Control for dictation, so I don’t need it on all the time.
+1
2018 Mac mini. If I let voice control run for more than 30 minutes the system is so overwhelmed that there is even a lag in typing text. That said, love it when it works!
Using Mac17,1; Quad-Core Intel Core i7; 32 GB Ram, macOS 10.15.1
At idle with background items I have, Activity Monitor hovers around 97-98% idle. Enabling VC moves the idle to 89-90%. When there’s sound in the room or me talking it goes down to around 83% idle and varies between that and 89% idle.
That’s too big a hit (to me) for the utility having VC available provides me. For someone who needs VC to function on the Mac it’d (I think) be very well worthwhile. As I mainly want Dictation, developing the practice of hitting fn twice is enough for me. Keyboard Maestro handles the rest of my needs at far less overhead.
Hopeful Apple will be able to reduce the resources needed for VC. Given this is its first iteration and Apple tends to refine its offerings over time, I’m hopeful.
I’d been using Dragon when I wanted VC to dictate and/or run the OS as it did both functions very well. Given they’ve abandoned us I’m even more looking to Apple to mature its offering.
After continuing to work with it over the past week it seems to actually consume more resources when it is in “Sleep” mode. This also causes an idle kernel task to spin up as well. Waking voice control actually consumes fewer resources. Unfortunately I can’t leave the app awake all the time, especially as I have people coming in and out of my office and like to have music playing sometimes. I have gotten in the habit of leaving System preferences open to Accessibility and just toggling it on and off. This greatly cuts down on the CPU usage and definitely keeps the machine running much cooler. I hope Apple will streamline this in the future because I really love Voice Control.