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Voice dictation in Word, Windows and Mac: a practical guide

Dictate text on your computer with nothing to install: Dictate in Word, Windows voice typing (Windows + H) and Mac Dictation, punctuation commands and limits.

The TechVoice team 8 min read

To dictate text on your computer, you probably have nothing to install. Windows, macOS and the iPhone include free speech-to-text, and Word adds its own Dictate button for Microsoft 365 subscribers. These tools are perfectly good for an email, a note or a first draft.

This guide explains how to turn them on, what to say for punctuation and what they cannot do, based on Microsoft’s and Apple’s help pages. Then it turns to the question that matters to doctors and lawyers: why these general-purpose tools stumble over professional vocabulary, and when a specialist tool is worth it.

The three tools at a glance

Word: Dictate Windows: voice typing Mac and iPhone: Dictation
Price Part of a Microsoft 365 subscription, and for subscribers only Included in Windows Included in macOS and iOS
Start Home tab, Dictate button; on a Mac, Option + F1 Windows key + H Microphone key or Dictation shortcut; on iPhone, the keyboard’s mic
Where In Word (and other Microsoft 365 apps) In any text box Anywhere you can type
Internet Reliable connection required Connection required On-device processing available in English
Automatic punctuation “Auto Punctuation” setting “Automatic punctuation” setting Automatic in English, can be turned off

Dictating in Word with the Dictate button

Turn it on. Open a document, go to the Home tab and select Dictate while signed in to Microsoft 365. Wait for the button to turn on, then speak: the text appears as you talk. On a Mac, the shortcut is Option + F1. To resume a paused dictation, Microsoft gives the shortcut Alt + ` or the mic icon in the floating dictation menu.

Requirements. Microsoft is clear: dictation is “only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers”. It is not available in Office 2016 or 2019 without Microsoft 365. You need a microphone, a reliable internet connection and, on a PC, Windows 10 or later. English (UK, US, Australia, Canada and India) is fully supported.

Punctuation commands. Say “full stop” or “period”, “comma”, “question mark”, “exclamation mark”, “colon”, “semicolon” or “new line”. For quotation marks: “open quotes”, then “close quotes”. If you would rather not dictate punctuation, the gear icon gives you the Auto Punctuation setting, along with the spoken language and microphone.

Correcting by voice. “Delete” removes the last word or punctuation mark before the cursor; “delete that” removes the last thing you said. Word can also format: dictate “review before tomorrow”, then say “bold tomorrow”. Words that Word may have misheard are flagged, with alternatives suggested.

Privacy. According to Microsoft, your speech is sent to its servers to produce the text, and the service does not store your audio or the transcribed text.

Dictating anywhere in Windows: voice typing (Windows + H)

Turn it on. Put the cursor in any text box (Word, your browser, your email) and press Windows key + H. On a touchscreen, tap the microphone on the touch keyboard. Wait for the “Listening...” prompt before you speak.

Requirements. An internet connection, a working microphone and a cursor in a text box. Voice typing in Windows 11 relies on online speech recognition, powered by Microsoft’s Azure Speech services, so it does not work offline. Several varieties of English are supported, including UK, US, Australian, Canadian, Indian and New Zealand English.

Commands. For punctuation: “full stop” or “period”, “comma”, “colon”, “question mark”, “exclamation mark”, “new line” or “new paragraph”. To stop: “stop listening” or “stop voice typing”. “Delete that” removes the last word or phrase you dictated, and “press Enter” works like the Enter key.

Useful settings. The gear icon in the voice typing panel offers the voice typing launcher (a mic that appears in text boxes), automatic punctuation, a profanity filter and the choice of microphone. “Fluid dictation”, which corrects grammar and punctuation as you speak, is limited to Copilot+ PCs and, for now, to English.

On Windows 10, the same Windows + H shortcut opens the dictation tool, which also needs an internet connection; its voice commands are available in US English only.

Dictating on Mac and iPhone with Dictation

Turn it on (Mac). Apple menu > System Settings > Keyboard, then turn on Dictation. To dictate, place the cursor, then press the Microphone key if your keyboard has one, use the Dictation keyboard shortcut (which you can change in the same settings) or choose Edit > Start Dictation.

Turn it on (iPhone). Settings > General > Keyboard, then turn on Enable Dictation. Then tap the keyboard’s mic in any text field.

Punctuation. Say the name of the mark, such as “exclamation mark”. “New line” is like pressing Return once, “new paragraph” like pressing it twice. In English, Dictation inserts commas, full stops and question marks for you; the Auto-punctuation option in Keyboard settings turns that off.

Length and offline use. On a Mac, Apple says you can dictate text of any length without a timeout; Dictation stops by itself after 30 seconds without speech. English is among the languages in which dictation can be processed on the device, after speech models are downloaded; Keyboard settings tell you whether that applies to you. On iPhone, Apple states that dictation is processed on the device in many languages, with no internet connection required.

Worth knowing. Ambiguous text is underlined in blue: click it to pick an alternative. If Voice Control (the accessibility feature for controlling the Mac by voice) is on, standard Dictation is not available. With Apple Intelligence, Dictation uses an on-device model to improve spelling, punctuation and capitalisation, in English, on Macs with M3 or later and at least 12 GB of unified memory.

The real limits of these free tools

  • Connectivity. Word and Windows voice typing send your voice to Microsoft’s servers: no network, no dictation. Apple can process English on the device, which matters if you dictate on the move or prefer your voice not to leave your computer.
  • The subscription for Word. The Dictate button is not free in the strict sense: it comes with Microsoft 365. Without a subscription, Windows voice typing (Windows + H) also works in Word.
  • Punctuation. Automatic punctuation helps, but you will often need to dictate the marks, especially in a structured document. Get used to “full stop”, “comma” and “new line”: that is what saves the most time when you review.
  • No memory of your vocabulary. None of the help pages we consulted describes a way to teach these tools your own terms, or to keep a correction for later dictations. If the tool gets a word wrong today, nothing suggests it will do better tomorrow.

That last point does not matter for an email. It becomes the main problem as soon as you dictate in your professional language.

General-purpose speech recognition learns from vast amounts of everyday speech, in which the terms of your profession are rare. When the sound is ambiguous, the model picks the most likely sequence of words in its experience: the everyday word beats the technical term.

We measured this with a recent transcription model, Mistral AI’s Voxtral, used on its own with no help on vocabulary. On our corpus of orthopaedic reports dictated in French, the text displayed during dictation got 25.2% of medical terms wrong. A real example: “hallux valgus” became “Puralux valgus”. These figures are not about Word, Windows or Apple, which we have not measured; they show what a good general-purpose model does with specialist vocabulary.

Law raises the same problem with different words: “res judicata”, “ultra vires”, “estoppel” or “quantum meruit” are absent from ordinary conversation. And in a medical report or a legal letter, an error cannot be fixed at a glance: every term has to be checked, document after document.

When a specialist tool is worth it

Stick with the built-in tool if you mostly dictate emails, personal notes or everyday writing: it is free or already paid for, and it works everywhere.

A specialist tool makes sense when three conditions are met:

  1. You dictate often: reports, letters, attendance notes, case summaries.
  2. Your vocabulary repeats from one document to the next: the same conditions, procedures, legal references.
  3. You keep correcting the same words. This is the surest sign: if you retype “hallux valgus” in every report, the time saved by speaking goes straight back into proofreading.

The simplest test: dictate a real document from your day with the built-in tool, then count the terms you have to fix.

What TechVoice does, and what it does not

TechVoice is voice dictation designed for professional vocabulary. Text appears as you speak; when you stop, a correction pass reworks it using your vocabulary, built from your field, a few sample documents you upload and every correction you make, which is kept for later dictations. The correction only touches misheard words: if it strays too far from what you said, the recognised text is kept.

On our test corpus, the correction brings the error rate on specialist terms down from about 25% to about 5% in live dictation. When each dictation benefited only from corrections made on the other dictations, the error rate fell from 13.9% to 1.7%. These figures come from synthetic voices, with no background noise, on dictations in French: they are optimistic, and a real voice in a real consulting room will produce more errors. The details are in our article on how AI dictation works.

Its limits, plainly:

  • French and English only for dictation, and our measurements were made in French.
  • A browser app (Chrome or Safari), with nothing to install: it does not dictate directly into Word. You copy the corrected text into your usual software.
  • No HDS certification, France’s certification for hosting health data. Do not dictate names, dates of birth or record numbers: dictate the medical content, then add the patient’s identity in your medical records software.

For use by profession, see our pages on medical dictation and legal dictation. Free points are offered when you sign up, with no credit card required; after that, pricing works in points, roughly one per minute of dictation.

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