everyday mac tools

Dictating names, jargon and technical terms accurately

· 6 min read

Speech recognition guesses from a model of ordinary language, so ordinary words come out right and your colleague’s surname does not. A better microphone will not fix it, because the problem is not that the sound was unclear. The fix is to give the software the words in advance: macOS has a vocabulary list inside Voice Control, and dictation apps keep their own.

Why proper nouns are the hard case

Recognition happens in two stages. The first turns sound into candidate phonemes. The second picks the most probable sequence of real words from those candidates, using a model of how the language usually goes.

That second stage is why dictation feels uncanny on normal prose. It corrects for a mumbled syllable because the surrounding words make only one sentence likely. It is also why it mangles names: there is nothing probable about “Siobhan”, “Kubernetes” or “project ALDER”, so the model reaches for whatever ordinary words sound closest. You get “Sha Vaughn”, “Cuban Eddies” and “project older”.

Three categories cause nearly all of the damage:

  • Personal names, especially ones whose spelling does not follow their sound in the language you dictate in.
  • Internal shorthand: project codes, product names, team names, ticket prefixes, client abbreviations.
  • Field-specific terms: drug names, chemical names, legal Latin, library and framework names, anatomical terms.

The last one is the most frustrating because they arrive in clusters. A paragraph of ordinary writing with four specialist nouns in it can take longer to correct than it took to say.

What macOS Dictation gives you, and what it does not

Turn dictation on in System Settings, Keyboard, Dictation. Set the language, set the microphone source explicitly rather than leaving it on Automatic, and pick a shortcut (pressing Control twice is the default on most keyboards; the microphone key works on keyboards that have one).

What you will not find anywhere in that panel is a word list. macOS Dictation has no user dictionary. If it hears your product name wrong, it will hear it wrong tomorrow. That is the honest limit, and it is the main reason people with specialist vocabularies end up looking beyond the built-in version.

Two things in that panel still help. Setting the language precisely matters more than it looks: a recognizer set to the wrong regional variant misses names it would otherwise know. And if you work across two languages, add both, because switching is faster than correcting.

Voice Control has the vocabulary list Dictation lacks

Voice Control is a separate system from Dictation, and it does have a word list. It is intended as a way to run the whole Mac by voice, but the vocabulary applies to text you dictate through it.

  1. Open System Settings, Accessibility, then Voice Control.
  2. Turn Voice Control on. The first time, macOS downloads its speech files; wait for that to finish.
  3. Click Vocabulary.
  4. Click the add button and type the word or phrase exactly as you want it written. Add your colleagues, your project codes, your recurring jargon.
  5. Close the sheet and try one in a text field.

Two things to know before you commit. Voice Control listens continuously while it is on, which is a different arrangement from pressing a key when you want to speak; you can put it to sleep by voice, but it is on by default. And it takes over commands as well as text, so words like “delete that” become instructions rather than words.

There is a genuinely useful piece here even if you do not adopt Voice Control fully: spelling mode. Say “spelling mode” and you can read a name out letter by letter, which gets an unusual surname down correctly the first time. Say “dictation mode” to go back to normal speech.

Text replacements, and their limits

System Settings, Keyboard, then Text Replacements (with the text input options) lets you map a short trigger to a long phrase. Typing zkb produces Kubernetes.

This is excellent for typing and unreliable for dictation. Replacements fire on typed input, and dictated words are inserted rather than typed, so whether the substitution happens depends on the app and how the text arrives. Test one on your own Mac before you build a list around it. If it works where you write, it is the cheapest fix available; if it does not, do not spend an afternoon on it.

Personal vocabulary in a dictation app

An app built for dictation can hold the list where it does the most good, which is inside recognition rather than after it. Voice Keyboard Pro keeps a personal vocabulary for names, project codes and jargon, and you hold a key to speak rather than leaving a microphone open. Its words land at the cursor in whatever app you are in, so the same list serves your mail, your notes and your chat.

Worth saying plainly: this does not make specialist terms perfect. A word list raises the probability of a term the model would otherwise never choose; it is not a guarantee, and terms that sound nearly identical to common words stay awkward. It also does not help with a term you have not added, which is why the list is worth building deliberately rather than adding to one word at a time in frustration.

Build the list before you need it

Twenty minutes once beats twenty seconds a day forever.

  1. Open the last month of your own writing: sent mail, notes, a document you wrote.
  2. Pull out every word a stranger would not know. Names, codes, acronyms, product names, recurring client abbreviations.
  3. Write each one exactly as it should appear, including capitalization and hyphens. MacBook Air, not macbook air.
  4. Add multi-word phrases as phrases where they always travel together. standard operating procedure as one entry beats three separate words.
  5. Add the ones you already know it gets wrong, from memory. You will have a list of five without thinking.

Review it once a quarter, because old project codes stop mattering and new ones arrive.

Technique that helps regardless of software

Slow down on the noun, not the sentence. People compensate for a hard word by speaking the whole sentence carefully, which sounds unnatural and makes recognition worse. Speak normally and give the difficult word a fraction more space on either side.

Do not over-enunciate. Recognition is trained on ordinary speech. Separating syllables carefully makes a word less like anything it knows.

Keep a placeholder for words that never land. If a term fails after three attempts, say a short stand-in you never otherwise use, then replace all instances afterwards. This keeps the drafting flow intact, which is the whole reason you were dictating.

Fix in one pass at the end. Stopping to correct mid-sentence costs more than the correction. Dictate the paragraph, then read and repair.

For work where a wrong term is a real problem rather than an annoyance, that final read is not optional. Dictating clinical notes on a Mac goes further into working with vocabulary that has to be right.

Questions

Does adding a word to Voice Control help macOS Dictation? No. They are separate systems with separate settings, and the vocabulary belongs to Voice Control. If you dictate with the Control-twice shortcut, that list does not apply.

Should I add every technical term I know? No. A vocabulary list of five hundred rare words adds candidates that compete with ordinary speech, and accuracy on normal writing can suffer. Add what you actually say, and prune what you stopped saying.

What about names that are spelled several ways? Add each spelling you genuinely use as its own entry, and accept that the software cannot tell which Sarah you mean. That one stays a human problem, and a find-and-replace before sending is the practical answer. Email is where it bites most often, which clearing an inbox by dictating the replies deals with.