Voice dictation on Mac: how to turn it on, and what it misses

How to turn on Dictation

1. Open the Apple menu › System Settings.
2. Click Keyboard in the sidebar. It sits fairly far down: you will probably have to scroll.
3. Find the Dictation section and turn it on.
4. macOS asks for confirmation: click Enable.
5. If it asks whether you want to help improve Siri and Dictation by sharing recordings, you can say Not Now without losing any feature.

On that same pane, under Dictation, macOS tells you whether your dictation is processed on the device or sent to Apple’s servers. It depends on the language and the Mac model, and it is worth reading before you dictate anything sensitive. Dictation inside search fields always leaves the device.

The shortcut, which is what actually matters

A feature you turn on from a menu is a feature nobody uses. What makes dictation part of your day is that it starts with your hands where they already were.

1. In System Settings › Keyboard › Dictation, open the Shortcut menu.
2. Pick one of the combinations in the list (Control twice, or the Fn key twice) or choose Customize and press the keys you want.
3. Place the cursor where you are going to type and use the shortcut. When the cursor flashes highlighted, or you hear the tone, it is already listening.
4. To finish, press Escape or the same shortcut. If it hears no voice for 30 seconds, it turns itself off.

If your keyboard has a microphone key in the function row, a tap starts dictation. Holding it opens Siri, which is a different thing: mixing the two up is the most common reason “Mac dictation does not work”.

Punctuation, line breaks, and emoji

On supported languages, Spanish included, macOS places commas, periods, and question marks on its own while you talk. If you prefer to dictate them yourself, turn that off in System Settings › Keyboard › Dictation, under automatic punctuation.

• Say the name of the mark to insert it: “exclamation point”, “colon”, “quotation mark”.
• “New line” is Return once; “new paragraph” is Return twice. Both show up when you finish dictating, not in the moment.
• Emoji are dictated by name: “heart emoji”, “car emoji”.
• Anything the system did not quite catch is underlined in blue. Click it and it offers alternatives.

On Macs with Apple silicon you can keep typing on the keyboard while you dictate, without cutting the session. It is the detail this feature gets most right.

Dictating in another language

Dictation does not guess which language you are speaking. You have to declare them first.

1. Go to System Settings › Keyboard › Dictation.
2. Click Edit next to Languages, and check the ones you use.
3. While dictating, switch between them with the globe key, or by clicking the language abbreviation next to the cursor.

It works, but it is a manual gesture in the middle of a sentence. If you work in two languages all day, that is the friction that adds up.

What macOS Dictation does not do

This is the half the tutorials skip. None of these four points is a defect: Apple Dictation does one thing, transcribe, and it does it well. It does not attempt the rest.

• It does not clean what you said. Filler words stay. If you start a sentence, change your mind, and start over, both versions appear on screen and you delete them.
• It does not know your words. Client names, team names, or your product get written as they sound, and there is nowhere to teach them.
• It does not change register. A WhatsApp message and an email to a client come out in the same tone, because the system does not know which app you are in.
• It does not translate or rewrite. You dictate in Spanish and it writes Spanish. For anything else, copy and paste into another tool.

When a separate app is worth it

An honest rule: if you dictate to avoid typing for a while, macOS Dictation is plenty and you have no reason to install anything. If you dictate to write (emails that get sent, notes someone else will read, messages that represent your work) the review afterwards eats the time you saved by speaking.

That is where an app with a language model behind it comes in. Parlate does the same thing as system Dictation (shortcut, you speak, the text appears at the cursor) and on top of that it drops filler words, respects the names you taught it, writes Latin American slang the way it is written, and can translate while you dictate. If you prefer to compare first, we have the full list of alternatives.