Voice commands while dictating: new line, undo, select all
· 6 min read
macOS splits voice commands in two, and knowing which half you are in explains most of the confusion. Dictation, the feature you turn on in Keyboard settings, understands formatting words like “new line” and the names of punctuation marks while you speak. Editing commands such as “select all”, “undo that” and “delete that” belong to Voice Control, a separate feature under Accessibility, which does dictation of its own as well.
What Dictation understands while you speak
Turn it on in System Settings, Keyboard, Dictation, then press the shortcut (pressing the Control key twice, by default) with the cursor in any text field.
While it is listening, these words are treated as instructions rather than as text:
- Punctuation. “Period”, “comma”, “question mark”, “colon”, “semicolon”, “open parenthesis”, “close parenthesis”. Say the name and you get the mark.
- Line breaks. “New line” moves to the next line. “New paragraph” leaves a blank line between.
- Capitalization. There are commands for capitalizing the next word and for holding capitals on for a stretch. The exact wording varies by language, so test the two or three you would actually use rather than memorizing a list.
If Auto-punctuation is on (same settings panel), commas and periods arrive from your pauses, and you only need to say the marks that matter: a question mark at the end of a question, a colon before a list.
That is close to the whole vocabulary. Dictation writes; it does not revise.
What Dictation will not do
It will not select, delete, replace, copy or undo. Say “select all” into a Dictation session and you get the words select all on the page. Say “undo” and you get undo.
This catches out anyone who used a Mac years ago, when a downloadable dictation option supported a longer command set, and it is the most common reason people decide that voice commands on the Mac are broken. They are not broken; they are somewhere else.
There is also no correction pass. If a name comes out wrong, you fix it with the keyboard or the trackpad and carry on.
Voice Control is the part that edits
System Settings, Accessibility, Voice Control, then turn it on. The first time, macOS downloads the files it needs, and a panel appears showing whether it is listening.
Voice Control handles commands and dictated text at the same time, on the device. Say “Go to sleep” and it stops acting on what it hears; “Wake up” brings it back. That pair matters more than any other command, because a microphone that is always listening in a room with other people needs an off switch you can say out loud.
Because Voice Control includes its own dictation, you generally use one feature or the other for a given task rather than running both.
The commands worth learning first
Say “Show commands” at any point and macOS lists what applies where you are standing. That list is long. These are the ones that earn their place on the first day:
- “Select all”, “Delete that”, “Undo that”, “Copy that”, “Paste that”.
- “Select” followed by a word or phrase, which puts the selection around text you can hear yourself having said.
- “Replace” followed by a phrase, then “with” and the correction, which fixes a misheard word without touching the keyboard.
- “Correct that”, which offers alternatives for what it just heard.
- “Press Command S”, and the same pattern for any other keyboard shortcut.
- “Show numbers”, which labels everything clickable on screen with a number you can say. “Show grid” does the same job with an overlay for things that have no label.
Six commands are enough to stop reaching for the keyboard mid-sentence. Sixty is a project, and most people who try to learn sixty give up in the first week.
Custom commands for the phrases you repeat
In Voice Control settings, open Commands, then add one with the plus button. A custom command is a phrase you say, optionally limited to a single app, plus an action: insert a block of text, press a keyboard shortcut, or run an Automator workflow.
Two that pay for themselves quickly:
- A phrase that inserts your standard sign-off, your address, or the paragraph you send every week.
- A phrase mapped to a keyboard shortcut you can never remember. Saying “file this” is easier than recalling which modifier combination your mail client uses.
While you are in Voice Control settings, open Vocabulary and add the words it keeps getting wrong: surnames, product codes, the town you live in.
When one held key is simpler
Both built-in features are toggles. Something is listening until you tell it to stop, and forgetting that state is how a dictated sentence ends up in the wrong document. For short bursts (a chat reply, a subject line, a commit message) a key you hold while speaking and release when you finish is less to think about.
That is the model Voice Keyboard Pro uses on the Mac: hold a key you choose (Left Control out of the box), speak, release, and the words land at the cursor in whatever app is in front, usually within 200 to 500 ms of the release. It infers punctuation from your pauses and understands spoken commands including “period”, “new line”, “select all” and “undo”, so the editing words that Dictation ignores do something. It needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and it never listens unless the key is down, which is the point of it. The free tier allows five dictations a day; the full version is a subscription covering the Mac and iPhone apps together with a 7-day trial, and it is the one subscription product in this studio.
If you are still deciding which key to hold or which shortcut to press, setting up a dictation hotkey on a Mac covers the choices and the conflicts.
Questions
Why does saying “period” sometimes type the word instead of the mark? Usually because you paused before it. Punctuation names are recognized as commands when they arrive inside the flow of a sentence; said on their own after a gap, they look like a word you meant. Keep the mark attached to the phrase before it and it behaves.
Do Voice Control commands work in every app? The text editing commands work anywhere macOS provides the standard text system, which is most apps. Apps that draw their own text area (some editors, some terminals, anything running inside a remote session) may take dictated words but ignore selection commands. “Show numbers” is the fallback there, and dictating code and shell commands goes into where this bites hardest.
Does any of this need a network connection? Voice Control runs on the device. Dictation on an Apple silicon Mac runs on the device for supported languages; on an Intel Mac it sends audio to Apple for processing. The note in the Dictation settings panel describes the behavior for your machine, and it is worth reading once rather than assuming.
What if I need to write the command words themselves? Writing about voice commands while Voice Control is listening is genuinely awkward, because “select all” is both a phrase and an instruction. Put it to sleep, type that passage, and wake it again. For a whole document full of command names, use plain Dictation instead, which treats every one of them as text.