How to make the dd command be verbose?

If you read man dd, it refers you to info coreutils 'dd invocation' which says, in part,

Sending an INFO signal to a running dd process makes it print I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying. In the example below, dd is run in the background to copy 10 million blocks. The kill command makes it output intermediate I/O statistics, and when dd completes normally or is killed by the SIGINT signal, it outputs the final statistics.

 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=10MB & pid=$!
 $ kill -s INFO $pid; wait $pid
 3385223+0 records in
 3385223+0 records out
 1733234176 bytes (1.7 GB) copied, 6.42173 seconds, 270 MB/s
 10000000+0 records in
 10000000+0 records out
 5120000000 bytes (5.1 GB) copied, 18.913 seconds, 271 MB/s

On systems lacking the INFO signal dd responds to the USR1 signal instead, unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.

You can also try the status=progress option:

[~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=10MB status=progress
4708234752 bytes (4.7 GB, 4.4 GiB) copied, 4 s, 1.2 GB/s
10000000+0 records in
10000000+0 records out
5120000000 bytes (5.1 GB, 4.8 GiB) copied, 4.3516 s, 1.2 GB/s
[~]$ 

There are several solutions available via google search.

From http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-dd-command-show-progress-while-coping/

(pv -n /dev/sda | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=128M conv=notrunc,noerror) 2>&1 | dialog --gauge "Running dd command (cloning), please wait..." 10 70 0

You may have to install dialog and pv

sudo apt-get install pv dialog