How to dictate on your Mac.

Turn it on

Straight from Apple’s own guide, current for macOS Tahoe:

1. 01

   Open the Apple menu and choose System Settings.

2. 02

   Click Keyboard in the sidebar, then find the Dictation section.

3. 03

   Turn Dictation on. Pick your microphone source and language here too.

4. 04

   Note the shortcut shown (the Microphone key on keyboards that have one, or a customizable shortcut such as pressing the Fn key twice).

Use it

1. 01

   Click into any text field, press the shortcut, and start talking.

2. 02

   Say punctuation out loud where you want it: "comma", "period", "question mark". In supported languages, macOS also inserts commas, periods, and question marks automatically as you speak.

3. 03

   Say "new line" or "new paragraph" for line breaks.

4. 04

   Stop with the Escape key, the Microphone key, or your dictation shortcut.

Where your audio goes

On Apple silicon Macs, dictation in supported languages can be processed on-device. Apple’s guide says you can check Keyboard settings to see whether your dictation is "processed on your device and not sent to Siri servers." It’s worth actually looking: the text below the Dictation setting tells you which side of the line you’re on.

When dictation isn’t working

The usual fixes, in the order worth trying: confirm the right microphone is selected in the Dictation settings and that its input level moves when you speak. If your language isn’t processed on-device, dictation needs an internet connection, so check that next (Apple’s troubleshooting page calls this out). If the shortcut does nothing, reassign it in the Dictation settings, since another utility may have claimed it. If a language was recently added, give it a moment to finish downloading. And the classic: dictation stops by itself after 30 seconds of silence, so if it keeps "turning off", that’s the designed behavior, not a bug.

The real limits

These are the walls people hit, stated plainly. There’s no custom vocabulary: macOS will keep mishearing your product names, library names, and jargon, and you can’t teach it. The 30-second silence stop interrupts think-then-talk workflows. Command support is thin compared with dedicated tools. Accuracy on technical speech is serviceable, not great. And there’s no transcript history you can open: once text lands, there’s no way to pull up, search, or re-use past takes.

None of that is a scandal; it’s a free feature with sensible defaults. But if you dictate for real work, several times an hour, into tools that care about exact words, the walls start to matter.

When a dictation app makes sense

A dedicated app earns its place when you need some combination of: a personal dictionary so your jargon comes out right every time, no silence timeout, verbatim text you can trust in front of an AI agent, transcript history you can search, or file transcription. That’s the category Edict is in: one key, on-device speech models that ship inside the app (offline from first launch), a CSV word list you or your agent can edit, and a wrong-window guard so text never lands in the wrong app. It’s a one-time purchase with a 7-day full trial, and the comparisons page will happily point you at a competitor if it fits you better.

Common questions