Dictionary

Teach Scribe the names, brands and terms it gets wrong, and the ways it tends to hear them.

What it’s for

Speech recognition is good at common words and poor at your surname, your product and your colleague’s name. The Dictionary fixes that. Each entry is a word and, optionally, the ways Scribe tends to hear it.

Add a word

Mac: Settings › Dictionary. Type the word or name in Word or name, any other spellings in Heard as separated by commas, and click Add word.
iPhone: Settings › Dictionary › +. The same two fields.

Example: word Okafor, heard as Okafore, Oka for. From then on, any of those in a dictation comes out as Okafor.

How it works

Scribe replaces the Heard as spellings in the text before and after Refine, so a rewrite cannot undo the correction. Matching ignores case and applies to whole words only. On-device speech recognition does not reliably honour custom vocabulary on its own, so explicit replacements are the dependable part.

Swipe to delete an entry on iPhone; use the − button on the Mac.

Learned entries

When you correct a word Scribe inserted, it offers to remember the spelling. Entries added this way carry a Learned caption and can be edited or removed like any other. See Auto-learning.

Names from Contacts

Turn on Use names from Contacts in Settings › Dictionary and Scribe uses the given names, family names and nicknames in your Contacts to spell people correctly. It is off by default, reads Contacts on the device only, and does not add the names to your Dictionary list.

On the keyboard

The iPhone letter keyboard’s suggestion bar draws on the Dictionary too: type the first letters of a Dictionary word and it is offered as a completion. Swipe typing can swipe Dictionary words.

Where it lives

On your device only. Mac and iPhone each have their own Dictionary; a backup carries it across.

Related guide: Dictating with an accent on a Mac

Related guide: How to type faster on a Mac