How to use dictation on Mac, and when an app is better

Turning it on, once

Dictation is part of macOS and only has to be switched on one time. Open the Apple menu, then System Settings, and click Keyboard in the sidebar. Switch on Dictation and confirm with Enable. In the same place you pick the shortcut that starts dictation, and you add any other languages you speak.[2]

After that, put the cursor where the text should go and start dictating with the microphone key, your shortcut, or Edit then Start Dictation. Apple states that you can dictate text of any length without a timeout. Dictation stops by itself after 30 seconds of silence, or you can stop it with Escape.[2]

Dictating punctuation and line breaks

Punctuation is spoken, not typed. Apple documents commands for punctuation, typography, formatting, capitalisation, maths, currency, emoticons and intellectual property symbols, so period, comma, new line, new paragraph, caps on, caps off, dollar sign and euro sign all work as spoken commands.[3]

This is the part most people never learn, and it is why dictation feels clumsy at first. Say new paragraph instead of reaching for the keyboard, and the whole thing stops breaking your rhythm.[3]

When dictation stops working

Apple lists nine causes, and they cover almost every report. Dictation is not switched on in Keyboard settings. The language or region is wrong. You are using the wrong keyboard shortcut. An external microphone is not connected or not selected in Sound or Keyboard settings. The input volume is too low. The microphone is blocked by clothing or your body. You are too far away, too quiet or too loud. There is background noise or echo, where Apple suggests a headset microphone. Or there is no internet connection, which Network settings will tell you.[4]

That last one is worth reading twice. Internet appears in Apple own troubleshooting list because some dictation features need it, which means the built-in tool is not reliably offline. Whether your voice stays on the device depends on the language, and Keyboard settings is where it says so.[4][2]

Where the built-in tool runs out

macOS does flag uncertainty, and it deserves credit for it: ambiguous text is underlined in blue, and clicking the word offers alternatives. Apple own example is getting flour when you meant flower. If you have never noticed this, it is worth looking for next time you dictate.[2]

What it does not do is tell you which kinds of mistakes matter. A blue underline appears where the recogniser saw two plausible words. It does not appear because a figure, a date, a client name or the word not is the thing that would change the meaning of the sentence. Those are exactly the words that fail silently: the sentence stays readable, so nothing prompts you to check it.[2][1]

Witness marks those categories specifically before the text is inserted: numbers, dates, proper names, negations and the terms in your own dictionary. You can replay the short audio fragment behind a marked spot and press a hotkey to see the untouched raw transcript, so you can tell what the cleanup changed. This is not a claim that Witness recognises speech more accurately than macOS, and there is no shared published benchmark that would support such a claim. It is a claim about what you are shown when recognition is unsure.[1]

So which one should you use

For notes, messages, search boxes and a quick first draft, the built-in dictation is free, already installed and good enough. Learn the punctuation commands and you will get a long way without installing anything.[3]

The calculation changes when dictated text goes into documents other people act on: quotes, client emails, case notes, tickets with names out of a codebase. There one wrong amount or one dropped not costs more than the app. Witness runs entirely on an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 14.4 or newer, costs €99 once for two Macs, and the 13-day trial is the full version with no account.[1]