A written reference for talking to the assistant - punctuation, names, and where voice beats the keyboard. The video is in Open It and Try Your First Command.
You talk about four times faster than you type, and most of what goes into it is something you would have said out loud anyway. This page is the practical side of that: how to punctuate while speaking, how to say a name so it lands on the right record, and where voice genuinely beats the keyboard.
Dictation is wherever there is something to write — the AI Assistant box, a Task Note, an email, an Invoice description, a Journal Entry. Look for the microphone.
Say the punctuation and it appears. "Spoke to Sarah this morning comma she wants the return filed before the fifteenth period" comes out as a proper sentence. The ones worth knowing are comma, period or full stop, question mark, new line and new paragraph.
You do not have to. Talk normally and Polish will punctuate it for you afterwards. Saying it yourself just means fewer corrections, and it is worth doing on anything that is going to a Client.
Names are where dictation earns its keep and also where it trips. Three habits fix most of it.
Say the full name. "Sarah Noodle" lands; "Sarah" may find two people, and the assistant will stop and ask rather than guess.
Say the record type first. "Open Client Sarah Noodle" is more reliable than "open Sarah Noodle", because it narrows the search before the name is matched.
Spell an unusual one once. If a surname comes back wrong every time, type it that once. Dictation is not learning the name, but you are not fighting it either.
Straight after a call. The Note is still in your head and your hands are not on the keyboard yet. Press Dictate and talk, and the Note is written before you have put the phone down.
Long Notes. Anything over a couple of sentences is faster said. It keeps listening through your pauses, so you can think out loud.
On a phone. The Business Card Scanner and the Receipt Scanner are built for a phone, and so is talking. Typing a paragraph with your thumbs is the thing voice was invented to avoid.
Where it does not win: short structured fields. A postcode, an amount, an account code. Type those.
The worry that stops most people is that it will read like a machine wrote it. That is what My Voice is for, under User Settings. Set your sign-off and describe your tone in a sentence, and everything Polish and the AI drafts comes back in it.
The strongest single thing you can do there is paste in an email you actually wrote. The AI copies rhythm and phrasing from a real example far better than from a description of one.
Speech is transcribed to text and it is the text that is saved to your record. See Why It Never Saves Without You for what happens to anything the assistant produces, and the privacy policy for where data lives.
No. Everything it writes lands in an editable field. Fix the word and carry on — re-dictating a whole Note to correct one word is slower than typing the word.
Yes, and that is the fastest way in. Press the microphone beside the box on your Dashboard, or the lightning bolt on any other screen, and say what you want.
Because two records matched. It asks rather than picking one, which is the behaviour you want — a Note on the wrong Client is worse than a question.
Dictation is on every screen with something to write. Nobody needs a video for the button. What people need is how to talk to it so it hears you properly. Start with the one that changes everything. Speak the punctuation. Say full stop. Say comma. Say new paragraph. It lays the text out instead of running the whole thing into one long breathless sentence you then have to go and fix.
Next, names. Names are where it struggles, every time. An ordinary word it will guess correctly from the sentence around it. Somebody's surname it has nothing to guess from. So say them slowly, or type the name and dictate the rest around it. And know when it is worth it.
Voice beats typing when your hands are busy, when you are on a phone, and when you are describing something rather than filling in a form. A long Note about a meeting, said in twenty seconds. It is worse than typing for a postcode. Then read it before it goes. It will have heard something wrong, and it will be a name.
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