English speech to text on your Mac

Numbers came out as words, the way they were said: “all twelve project pages” and “three of them”. The call has no prices, percentages or times, so the sample doesn’t show how NoteOwl writes those. Check the figures in anything you send on.

Capitals follow NoteOwl’s own sentence breaks, not the speaker’s. Where it didn’t end a sentence, the next one carried on in lower case: “Pretty close” runs into “all twelve project pages”, and “honestly I’d rather wait” and “sounds good” each start a line with a small letter.

The punctuation is looser than the spelling. One of the three questions, “or do we wait”, lost its question mark, and a few full stops and commas were missing, including the comma after “Honestly”. NoteOwl starts a new line where a speaker pauses, so a line can stop mid-sentence, as “Yes, I’ll have them” does.

When you dictate, the panel offers Polish as you stop. It’s free, and it tidies punctuation and capital letters like these in the app you dictated into.

Pinning English means your words can’t come out in another script, which Auto-detect can occasionally get wrong. The trade-off: while English is pinned, dictation and meetings are written with the Latin alphabet only, so before a call held in Hindi, Greek or Japanese, switch to Auto-detect.

Recordings you import ignore the setting, and so do voice notes you record with New Dictation: NoteOwl works out their language itself. That is how it transcribed the sample above, with nothing chosen in advance.

We haven’t published a British sample, so this page doesn’t show how NoteOwl handles a British, Irish, Australian or Indian accent, or whether it writes colour or color. Try it on a short recording of your own before you rely on it for a long meeting.

For British spellings you use often, a Pro vocabulary rule fixes the word from then on: type gray, then grey. Rules match whole words only, so that rule leaves grayscale alone, and grays needs a rule of its own.

A rule matches in any mix of capitals and writes your spelling exactly as you typed it, so a rule can turn “sequel” into SQL. Choose triggers that never mean anything else, though: that rule would also rewrite the sequel to a film. Dictation, meetings and imports all use your rules.