You dictate a clean sentence and your Mac hands back something strange: a random word Capitalized in the middle, a sentence in a web form that starts lowercase, a colleague’s name in lowercase, and a lonely “i” where “I” should be. Then you stop, grab the mouse, and fix the casing by hand. Every time. It feels random because, from where the dictation is standing, it more or less is.
Why stock dictation gets casing wrong
The core problem is that the dictation layer often cannot see the text already sitting in front of your cursor. It hears audio and produces words, but it does not reliably know whether you are at the start of a sentence, mid-thought, or halfway through a name in a browser field. So it guesses. In a plain note it might guess well. In a web form, a chat box, or a code editor, it guesses badly, because those fields do not hand the dictation engine the surrounding text to reason about.
That guessing is why the same failure modes keep showing up. Sentence starts get missed when the engine cannot tell a new sentence began. Proper nouns lose their capital because the engine does not recognize them as names (a problem that pairs with plain name and jargon recognition). And the standalone “I” drops to lowercase because, out of context, it just looks like any other short word.
Saying “capital” out loud does not really fix this either. It is one more thing to remember mid-sentence, the same tax you pay when you speak punctuation aloud. The casing should just be correct.
The honest fix in Dictato
Here is the honest part: Dictato does not fix casing straight out of the box. The moment you dictate, it always tidies your text (removing filler words and stray repeats, and formatting numbers, dates, and money), but that automatic cleanup deliberately does not touch letter casing. Until you turn something on, your casing is only as good as whatever the speech engine produced.
Casing correction switches on when you enable Auto-correct, or when you set up a profile for a specific app. Once it is on, Dictato re-reads the finished dictation and repairs the casing in two passes. An on-device AI step handles the context-aware work: proper nouns, the standalone “I”, initialisms, and general re-casing based on what the sentence actually means. Then a simple, cautious rule guarantees each sentence starts with a capital letter. That rule only ever raises a single letter at a sentence start, and it knows to leave abbreviations like “e.g.” and “p.m.” alone, so it can never scramble your words.
All of this runs locally on your Mac. Nothing is sent to a server. There are no spoken casing commands to memorize, no “caps on” to interrupt your flow. You turn Auto-correct on once, keep talking, and the casing gets fixed for you when the correction runs. It is best-effort rather than magic, but it beats reaching for the mouse after every sentence.