Dictation in Mac Apps: Word, Pages, Notes, Mail, Terminal

Apple says Apple Dictation works anywhere you can type on a Mac ¹. Three exceptions matter in practice: Microsoft's Office apps have their own Dictate button, Google Docs uses the browser's speech service, and the Apple pages we read do not cover Terminal. The table near the end gives one row per app, with the menu to use and the requirement that applies.

Apple Dictation types into any app that accepts text, with a few known exceptions

Apple Dictation is a system feature, so it works wherever the cursor is in a text field. Apple says that with Dictation on a Mac you can speak to enter text in any place where you can type ¹. The exceptions are specific. Apple's note on general text Dictation gives composing messages and notes as examples and leaves out dictating into a search box ². On macOS 27, turning on Voice Control means you dictate with Voice Control, and standard Dictation is not available ³.

Length is rarely the problem. Apple says you can dictate text of any length without a timeout ⁴. Silence is the limit: Dictation stops when it hears no speech for 30 seconds ⁵. If Dictation stops in the middle of your text, check for a pause of 30 seconds or more first. Our guide to why Mac dictation stops or types nothing covers the other causes.

Apple's Mac Help says you can check in Keyboard settings whether general text Dictation is processed on your device and not sent to Siri servers ⁶. Check that setting if privacy matters for the app you use.

The exceptions have different causes, so the fix differs by app. Apple says general Dictation on a Mac may need an internet connection, and Keyboard settings show whether your dictation is processed on the device ⁷. Microsoft's Dictate is a Microsoft 365 feature, so its requirements come from Microsoft's own pages. Google's voice typing hands the speech service to the browser, which is why the browser version matters. Claude Code's dictation audio is not processed on your computer, so it is a different privacy decision from Apple's on-device setting ⁸. When one of these fails, start with the app that owns the feature, not with the Mac's general settings.

Pages, Notes and Mail work with Apple Dictation once it is turned on

Apple's own examples of general text are composing messages and notes ², so Notes and composing messages in Mail are the examples Apple gives. Pages has its own menu entry. In a Pages document, choose Edit > Start Dictation ⁹. If you have not used dictation before, the guided setup appears first.

To turn Dictation on, follow these steps on the Mac:

1. Choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Keyboard in the sidebar.
2. Open the Dictation section and turn Dictation on ¹⁰.
3. Click in a text field in Notes or Mail, then press the Dictation shortcut. In Pages, you can also choose Edit > Start Dictation.

You can change the Dictation shortcut to a combination you prefer ¹¹. The Mac dictation shortcut guide lists the key options. For spoken punctuation, Apple's Mac commands include new line and new paragraph ¹². In supported languages Dictation also inserts some punctuation on its own ¹³. The full list is in the Mac dictation commands guide.

Mail is not covered by a separate Apple page that we could find. It falls under Apple's general statement about any text field, so test it in your own account before you rely on it for long messages.

Word, Outlook and PowerPoint for Mac use Microsoft's own Dictate, which needs Microsoft 365

Microsoft's article on Dictate in Microsoft 365 applies to the desktop versions of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint in Microsoft 365 or in supported perpetual versions ¹⁴. The same article lists Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac and PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 for Mac among the apps it covers ¹⁵. So Word and PowerPoint on a Mac have Dictate, but it is Microsoft's feature, not Apple's.

Microsoft's requirements are the first thing to check. In Word for Microsoft 365, Dictation needs a microphone and a reliable internet connection ¹⁶. In Outlook, the feature is only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers ¹⁷. If a Word or Outlook Dictate button is missing or greyed out, a missing subscription or internet connection is the first thing to rule out. The question on why Dictate is greyed out in Word on a Mac walks through those checks, and the question on dictating in Word on a Mac covers the steps.

In new Outlook, you start a new email or reply, select the body of the message, go to the Message tab and select Dictate ¹⁸. Word's spoken punctuation follows Microsoft's English command table, which includes period, comma, question mark, exclamation mark and new line ¹⁹.

We could not confirm the exact position of the Dictate button in every Mac version from an official Microsoft page, and we did not confirm Microsoft's Outlook steps on Outlook for Mac. The Microsoft article points to separate Word and PowerPoint articles without naming the Mac menu, so check the Home tab in your version.

When Office Dictate is not available, you can try Apple Dictation in the same document. We did not test that combination. The guide to dictating in Outlook, Gmail and other mail apps compares the options for email.

Google Docs voice typing runs in the browser, and the supported browsers have changed

Google Docs does not use Apple Dictation. Google says that when you turn on voice typing, your web browser controls the speech-to-text service ²⁰. The browser list on Google's help page, in the Internet Archive copy from 10 October 2026, is Chrome, Edge and Safari, each in its latest version ²⁰. An archived copy from December 2020 said voice typing was only available in Chrome ²¹. If you read older advice that Chrome is the only browser, that advice predates the change.

To start voice typing, open a document in a supported browser, choose Tools > Voice typing, and click the microphone ²². On a Mac, the keyboard shortcut is Command + Shift + S, and Google lists it as available in Chrome ²³.

Because the browser runs the speech service, the Apple Dictation settings are not the switch for Google Docs. Check the browser's microphone permission instead. Chrome asks for permission when a site wants the microphone, with the options Allow while visiting the site, Allow this time and Never allow ²⁴. The question on dictating in Google Docs on a Mac covers the troubleshooting order, and the guide to Google Docs voice typing covers the feature in more detail.

Terminal and Claude Code: Apple's pages do not cover Terminal, and Claude Code has its own dictation

Apple's Mac Help describes Dictation as working anywhere you can type ¹, but the pages we read do not name Terminal, so we cannot say from Apple's documentation that Apple Dictation works there. We did not test it on a Mac for this guide. If you want to try it, speak a harmless word into an empty prompt before you dictate a command.

Claude Code has its own voice dictation, separate from Apple's. Claude's help center says that in Claude Code, dictation is available but voice mode is not ²⁵. In the CLI, run /voice to enable it ²⁶. On a Mac, running /voice triggers the macOS microphone prompt for your terminal app if that permission has never been granted ²⁷.

The two dictation features differ in privacy and limits. Claude Code's dictation audio is not processed on your computer ⁸. It is only available when you sign in with a Claude.ai account, not with an API key or a cloud provider ²⁸. In tap mode, it stops recording after 15 seconds of silence ²⁹ or after two minutes in total ³⁰. Apple's Dictation waits longer before it stops on silence, as the chart shows.

Claude Code's dictation needs a local microphone, so it does not work in cloud sessions or SSH sessions ³¹. If you want to dictate into Claude Code, use a Terminal window on the Mac itself, where the microphone is local.

If Claude Code cannot hear you, check that your terminal app is allowed to use the microphone in macOS. If that is not working, the question on dictating in Terminal on a Mac lists the checks. For the Claude Code side, see voice dictation for AI coding tools and our Claude Code dictation page.

Voice Memos transcribes finished recordings, which is different from dictation

Dictation types what you say into the cursor as you say it. Transcription turns a recording into text afterward. The Voice Memos app on a Mac does transcription: Apple says speech in your audio recordings can be recognized and transcribed to text in Voice Memos ³².

Availability depends on where you live. Apple says audio transcription is not available in all countries or regions ³³, so check that the option appears in your copy before you plan around it. The question on turning a voice memo into text on a Mac covers the steps, and the guide to transcribing voice memos compares the other options.

Accuracy depends on the engine, and Apple's engine trailed in one 2025 test

Dictation accuracy depends on the engine behind it, and one 2025 test found Apple's engine trailed. In a 2025 9to5Mac test of one 7-minute-31-second episode, Apple's speech API, reached through a third-party app rather than the Dictation feature, had a word error rate of 10.3 percent ³⁴. The same test gave Whisper Large V3 Turbo a word error rate of 1.5 percent ³⁵, the lowest of the three engines the author tried.

This is one episode and one author's test, so treat it as a single data point rather than a ranking. Apple's Dictation also marks what it is unsure of: it underlines ambiguous text in blue, so you can click the word and choose an alternative ³⁶. Check those underlined words before you send a document. The word error rate entry in our glossary explains how the measure is calculated. For long or technical text, test your own material before you choose, and see the guide to the best dictation apps for Mac for the built-in and third-party options.

A table of what works where on a Mac

The table gives the short answer for each app. Use it as the first check, then read the section above for the details.

The flowchart shows the order to try when you are not sure which route applies.

For the whole subject, see our overview of Mac dictation. For more on the built-in options, read how to use dictation on a Mac and Voice Control on a Mac. If you need to control the whole computer by voice rather than dictate text, dictation vs Voice Control vs Siri on a Mac explains the difference. Apple's terms are defined in the Apple Dictation glossary entry and the microphone key entry.

When built-in dictation is not enough for the apps you use, a dedicated Mac dictation app is the next step. Yap, which we make, runs dictation on the Mac itself. You can see what it includes on the download page.