There hasn't been any fanfare about this, but if you are using Mavericks, you now have a universal dictation feature that doesn't require an Internet connection.
Dictation made its debut in Mountain Lion and required an Internet connection so your speech could be processed on an Apple server and sent back to you as text. There were limits, and you had to pause to let your data get to Apple and back again. It worked, but it wasn't very effective.
Mavericks users will now find what Apple calls 'enhanced dictation', and if you turn it on you'll need to download about an 800 MB file that makes your speech recognition local rather than server based. No training is needed, once you have the files it works right away, and I found the recognition quick and accurate. As
