You dictate a three-line reply and back comes a lowercase run-on with “fifty percent” and “five euros” spelled out in words. Cleaning it up costs more than typing did. Four fixes, in order, and the first is already done for you.
What already comes out right
Dictate in English or French and figures, dates, times, currency, percentages and phone numbers are converted for you, with no setting to switch on: “the meeting is at twelve thirty am” comes out as “the meeting is at 12:30 am”, and “may one twenty twenty six” as “May 1, 2026”. In any other language this step does nothing.
It is conservative on purpose: “the fourteenth of July” converts, a bare “the fourteenth” does not. The conversion also runs after the AI correction step, so the AI cannot undo it. More on numbers, dates and currency in dictation.
The switch that ends the wall of text
Sentence capitals, commas, full stops and paragraph breaks appear only if you turn on Auto-correct (Settings, Post-processing, “Fixes spelling, grammar, and removes filler words”) or set a per-app profile whose action is Proofread or Rewrite with tone. Auto-correct is off by default: that wall of text was the app doing what it was told.
In its standard form, Auto-correct runs on Apple’s built-in on-device AI, which needs macOS 26 or later with Apple Intelligence enabled and a supported language; without that, the step hands your text back untouched. With Auto-correct on and no profile, dictations that are very short (under eight words) or already clean are skipped on purpose. Paragraph breaks follow topic changes, not the length of your pauses.
Set the polish once for your mail app
Per-app profiles are off by default (toggle “Enable per-app rules”). Do it before you are mid-reply: the first time you turn them on with the default Proofread action, Dictato opens a window you cannot dismiss to download a local AI model of about 3.4 GB, and the only escape is a “Turn off Profiles” button.
A profile matches the exact app plus an optional website address (“URL pattern (optional)”, placeholder “mail.google.com or *.slack.com”), so a rule on mail.google.com covers Gmail and not your other tabs. Only the address is matched, never the path.
The first time a rule fires on a browser, macOS asks for Automation permission, and if you deny it the app quietly falls back to the browser-wide rule. Site rules work in Safari, Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, Vivaldi and Opera, not Firefox. For mail, choose Rewrite with tone and the tone named Email, described in the app as “The body of an email, short, polite paragraphs.” More in how per-app profiles work.
Names that keep coming out wrong
List recurring names and terms in the Vocabulary “Context” field (Settings, Post-processing), which tolerates near misses, holds 200 characters and ignores terms under three characters. Short names belong in Voice commands of category “Word” instead: a trigger phrase becomes exact text, with the master Voice commands toggle off by default. Addresses stay manual, since nothing turns spoken “at” and “dot” into one: see dictating email addresses and links.
Every dictation is saved to history before the paste is attempted, so if nothing lands in the compose field, open History (Option+H by default) and paste it yourself.