How to dictate on a Mac

Turn on Dictation in System Settings → Keyboard, click where you want the text, press the Microphone key or Fn twice, and speak. Press Escape when you are done. The rest of this page is the detail — and the limits worth knowing before you rely on it.

Based on Apple’s own guide for current macOS. It is the same on every Mac, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro included.

Turn Dictation on

1. Apple menu → System Settings → Keyboard.
2. Find Dictation and switch it on, then click Enable.
3. Pick your language, and the microphone under Microphone source — set it by name rather than leaving it on Automatic if you use a headset or a display with its own mic.

The dictation keyboard shortcut

The Shortcut menu in the same place offers:

• Press the Microphone key — recent MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboards have one in the function row.
• Press Fn (🌐) twice.
• Customize — any combination you like, for example Option-Z.

If pressing Fn does something else — the emoji picker, the input menu — look at System Settings → Keyboard → “Press 🌐 key to”, or at a key-remapping tool such as Karabiner. You can always start it from the menu instead: Edit → Start Dictation. To stop, press Escape, the Microphone key, or the shortcut again.

Punctuation, new lines and emoji by voice

• Say the mark: “comma”, “question mark”, “exclamation mark”.
• “New line” is one Return; “new paragraph” is two.
• Say the name of an emoji: “heart emoji”.

Dictating in Word, Pages and Google Docs

• Pages, Notes, Mail, TextEdit — the Mac’s own Dictation works directly: click into the document and use your shortcut.
• Microsoft Word has its own Dictate button on the Home tab. That is Microsoft’s service, not the Mac’s; the Mac shortcut works in Word too, and you can use either.
• Google Docs has Tools → Voice typing, which works in Chrome. In other browsers, use the Mac’s Dictation.
• Cursor, VS Code and the terminal — dictating prompts to coding agents has its own catches.

More than one language

Add each language in the Dictation settings. While you dictate, switch by clicking the language shown next to the cursor, or with the Globe key. Dictation listens for one language at a time; it does not notice by itself that you changed.

The limits

• It stops after 30 seconds of silence. In Apple’s words, Dictation “stops automatically when no speech is detected for 30 seconds”. There is no setting for it.
• It is not always on your Mac. Depending on the Mac and the language, your voice may be processed by Apple’s servers. Keyboard → Dictation says which applies to you, and if it is the server, Dictation stops working without a network.
• One language at a time, switched by hand.

If it does not start at all, or listens and types nothing: twelve fixes, sorted by symptom.