A good prompt is long. Role, context, the actual task, the format you want back: three or four paragraphs before you have said anything interesting. Typing all that is slow, so most people trim it down, and a vague prompt earns a vague answer.
Speaking it is faster, if two things hold. The recording must not cut you off while you think, and nothing should quietly reword the prompt before the assistant reads it.
Talk into the box you already use
Dictato pastes into whichever app was in front when you started dictating, so an assistant’s desktop app, a browser tab and a terminal all behave alike. No extension to install, and nothing to reconnect when the assistant redesigns its interface.
Out of the box you hold one key, right Command, talk, and release. If you would rather press once to start and once to stop, that is a setting: see push to talk versus toggle.
Thinking pauses are not the end of a sentence
There is no silence timeout. Stop mid-sentence, work out what you actually want, carry on. Nothing ends the recording except the two hour ceiling, or Escape if you want to bin the take.
So speak the prompt in blocks: who the assistant should be, what it is looking at, what you want done, how you want the answer laid out. One block per breath, pausing between them.
Leave the clean-up layer off for prompts
Auto-correct ships switched off. Turn it on and it adds sentence punctuation and commas, fixes capitalization, and can split your text into paragraphs when the topic changes. That is what you want for an email. For a prompt it is often the wrong trade, because a tidier sentence can smooth away the odd, specific detail you were being careful about.
If you have turned Auto-correct on for your writing apps, per-app profiles let you carve out an exception. One action is called Skip (raw transcription), described in the app as being for apps where you want exactly what you said. Profiles need switching on plus a one-time on-device model download, and in supported browsers a rule can be narrowed to one site once you grant Automation permission.
Raw is not byte for byte, though. Hesitation sounds such as um, uh and euh come out, so do stuttered repeats, the first letter may be capitalized, and in English and French spoken numbers, dates and amounts arrive as digits.
When the send box eats your prompt
The finished text is written to your local history before the paste is even attempted, so a fussy web input cannot swallow four paragraphs of work. If you wandered off to another app mid-dictation, Dictato refuses to paste at all and hands you a preview window instead.
History is searchable, opens on Option+H, keeps thirty days by default and pastes any old entry straight back. It earns its keep here: a paste an app silently ignores still looks like success from the outside, so the saved copy is the real safety net.
All of this runs on your Mac. Your voice and your prompt stay there, and the network is only used for licensing, updates, model downloads and, during the free trial, anonymous usage counts.