How do I start dictating?

Q: How do I start dictating?

Click where you want the text, hold Right Ctrl, talk, and let go. A moment later the finished, punctuated text is typed at your cursor.

The short answer

Click where you want the text, hold Right Ctrl, talk, and let go. A moment later the finished, punctuated text is typed at your cursor.

Your first dictation

Click into a text box. An email, a chat message, a document, a search box, an AI prompt: anywhere you could type.
Hold Right Ctrl. A small pill appears at the bottom of the screen to show it is listening.
Talk the way you would to a colleague. You do not need to say "comma" or "full stop".
Let go. About a second later the finished text is typed where your cursor is.

That is all there is to it. Most people have their first words typed within two minutes of installing.

Talk naturally, not like a robot

Older dictation software made you speak slowly, pronounce every word and say the punctuation out loud. Perfect Dictation works the other way round: talk at your normal pace, pause to think, start a sentence again. The clean-up takes care of the rest:

Punctuation and capitals are added for you, from the way you speak.
Fillers such as "um", "uh" and "you know" are taken out.
Corrections keep only the final version: "Tuesday, no, Wednesday" becomes "Wednesday".
Paragraphs are added when you move on to a new point in a longer dictation.

It never adds names, facts or sign-offs you did not say. See Will it change what I meant?

It writes for the app you are in

Perfect Dictation sees the name of the app you are dictating into and picks a matching style: full sentences in Outlook, short and casual in Slack or WhatsApp, a clear instruction in Claude or ChatGPT, exact names and symbols in a code editor. You can change the style for any app in Settings. See What are styles?

Sending a chat message by voice

In chat apps, finish with the word "send" and it presses Enter for you once the text is typed. Leave it off and the message waits in the box for you to check first. "Send" itself is never typed.

If nothing appears

Check you clicked into a text box before holding the key.
Check the tray icon is there and not paused.
Open History from the tray icon: every dictation is kept there, ready to copy, even if it could not be typed.

More fixes in Nothing is typed when I let go.

Three habits that help

Say a whole thought, then let go. One sentence or a short paragraph per dictation reads more naturally than a word at a time.
Teach it your names. Add colleagues, clients and product names to your dictionary once and they are spelt right from then on.
Use hands free for long pieces. Double-tap the key to talk for up to ten minutes without holding anything.