How do you proofread dictated text?

Proofread dictated text by meaning first. Dictation produces valid words, so a spell check or a quick skim passes most of its mistakes. Read the whole passage once to ask whether each sentence says what you meant, then check the places the engine is likely to get wrong: underlined words, homophones, word endings and names. Do this as a separate pass after you finish drafting, and correct with the keyboard or mouse, because correcting by speaking again often fails too. The wider set of dictation errors is in the dictation mistakes guide, within the dictation topic.

Read for meaning, because dictation errors are real words

A typing mistake can be a broken spelling, and your eye catches it. A dictation mistake can be a real word in the wrong place, and your eye reads it as correct. The software does flag some of these. Apple's Dictation on Mac underlines ambiguous text in blue ¹. Because the underline marks only ambiguous text, a confident wrong choice may get no underline. Read the whole passage, and treat the underlines as a starting list rather than the full list.

Listening back misses many errors

Reading the screen is not the only option, but listening is not a complete check either. In one study, participants missed identifying over 50 percent of speech recognition errors when they listened to the audio output of the recognized text ². Identification got worse at higher speech rates, and the study tested 300 words per minute ³. Adding a pause between words improved how well people identified errors in online studies ⁴. These results come from synthetic read-back, not from reading your own draft. We did not find a measured detection rate for visual proofreading of dictated text, so do not assume the 50 percent figure applies to your screen.

Correct by keyboard, not by speaking again

Correcting dictation takes more of the task than most people expect. Vertanen reports that when dictating with a large-vocabulary recognizer, correcting errors dominates the task time ⁵. Speaking the correction can fail too. When people correct dictation errors by speaking again, the spoken correction is often misrecognized as well, which costs time ⁶. In Word dictation, Microsoft says that at the moment corrections cannot be made fully with voice, so some fixes still need suggestions or the keyboard ⁷.

So mark each problem during the read-through, then fix them in one pass with the keyboard. Stopping to correct every error by voice can cost more time than it saves.

A procedure that matches the errors

1. Read the whole passage once for meaning. Ask whether each sentence says what you meant, and mark any sentence that does not.
2. Check every underlined word and every homophone against the meaning of its sentence, not its spelling. The homophone entry explains why these pass a spell check.
3. Check endings and small words: plurals, past tense, "a" and "an", "is" and "was", and "not." These are the endings that a quiet word can lose, as described in the dictation mistakes guide.
4. Check names and numbers against your source, such as the email, the notes or the record you dictated from.
5. Listen back with pauses between sentences, and fix anything you hear that does not match the text.

It depends on the length and the stakes

• Short messages can be checked in one read-through, which may be enough.
• Long documents are easier to proof in sections. Check one section fully before you move on, so that the sound-alike errors in one part do not hide the others.
• Records where an error has consequences, such as medical, legal or financial text, need a review by the person responsible for the record, against the source, and not only a check by the dictator.

The method does not replace the source. If a word is wrong because it is a name or a term the engine does not know, fix it at the source and then teach the software if your app allows it. See how to make dictation spell names correctly. If the errors cluster in the same places every time, check the microphone and the room first, as in how to improve dictation accuracy. The steps for dictating without stopping to edit are in how to dictate.