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Teach Mac dictation new words: names, jargon, brands

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To add words to Mac dictation, you need a list that pairs what the speech model hears with the spelling you want. Apple's Dictation has no such list in its settings, so there you fix words as you go, try Text Replacements, or switch to Voice Control and its custom vocabulary. YapToText, the free dictation app I built, has a Dictionaries page for exactly this job, and everything in it stays on your Mac.

Names are the classic case, and mine is the one I live with: the microphone hears Riley, and I spell it Ryleigh. I built YapToText because my hands make typing difficult, and I dictate every day. Below is what Apple offers, then how to teach YapToText a name, a product and an acronym, and what to do when a word still will not stick.

Download YapToText on the Mac App StoreDownload for free. No account, nothing locked, macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. Source on GitHub.

On this page: 11 sections
  1. Steps
  2. What Apple's Dictation lets you change
  3. Teach YapToText a word in three steps
    1. Step 1: Find what Whisper actually heard
    2. Step 2: Add the entry
    3. Step 3: Dictate it
  4. Three examples: a name, a product, an acronym
    1. A person's name
    2. A product name
    3. An acronym
  5. Whole word, Case, order and more than one dictionary
  6. Add a word without opening the Dictionaries page
  7. Compare Apple's options with YapToText
  8. What each one cannot do
  9. If a word still comes out wrong
  10. The short version
  11. Questions

Steps

  1. Open History in YapToText and click Show pipeline details on a dictation where the word came out wrong.
  2. Note the spelling in the raw transcript.
  3. On the Dictionaries page, type that spelling in Heard and your spelling in Replace with.
  4. Leave Whole word on and Case off, then press Add.
  5. Dictate the word again and check that it lands spelled your way.

What Apple's Dictation lets you change

The Dictation settings Apple lists in Keyboard settings are the switch, Languages, Microphone source, Shortcut and Auto-punctuation. None of them is a word list. Apple's Dictation has no place to add a word, so you work around it. There are three ways around it:

  • Fix words as you go. Dictation underlines words it was unsure of in blue. Click one and choose the alternative, or type or dictate the right word. That fixes the word on the page, not for next time.
  • Text Replacements. Choose Apple menu, System Settings, click Keyboard in the sidebar, then click Text Replacements. Click the Add button, type the text to replace and its replacement, then click Add. Apple describes them as automatic replacements in many Mac apps, such as teh to the. Its page does not say whether they fire on dictated text, so test one in your own app before you rely on it. What Apple does document is applying them to text that is already there: select it, choose Edit, Substitutions, Show Substitutions, make sure Text Replacement is selected, then click Replace in Selection.
  • Voice Control's vocabulary. Voice Control, Apple's separate accessibility feature, has a custom vocabulary. Apple says you can add up to 1,000 terms in System Settings, Accessibility, Voice Control, record how you say each one, and add a selected word by saying Add to vocabulary, in languages that support a custom vocabulary. The catch: while Voice Control is on, standard Dictation is not available, and you dictate through Voice Control instead. The Voice Control versus Dictation guide weighs that trade.

If the trouble is not one word but lots of them, the cause is usually the microphone, the room or the language setting, not your vocabulary. The guide to improving dictation accuracy puts those fixes in order, biggest first.

Teach YapToText a word in three steps

YapToText's Dictionaries page holds entries that each say: when you hear this, write that. An entry applies to every dictation from then on. Put what the speech model heard in Heard, not what you meant to say.

Step 1: Find what Whisper actually heard

  • You: Open History, find a dictation where the word came out wrong and click Show pipeline details.
  • YapToText: Shows the raw transcript, what the speech model heard before any fix ran.
  • Check: You can see the exact wrong spelling, such as riley.
A YapToText History entry with pipeline details open: raw transcript, cleaned transcript, mode, delivery, target app and timings.
Figure 1. The raw transcript sits above the cleaned text. Its spelling, not yours, is what goes in Heard.

Step 2: Add the entry

  • You: On the Dictionaries page, in a dictionary such as General, type the wrong spelling in Heard and your spelling in Replace with, then press Add.
  • YapToText: Saves it and uses it from your next dictation.
  • Check: The entry appears with a word tag, which means Whole word is on.

Step 3: Dictate it

  • You: Tap Right Command, say a sentence with the word in it, and tap again.
  • YapToText: Hears it with your spelling in mind, then applies the entry.
  • Check: The word lands spelled your way.

The entry works twice. Since 1.2, before Whisper decodes your audio, YapToText builds a short list from the Replace with side of your entries and hands it to Whisper as a prompt, which leans it toward your spellings. Then the replacement runs as a safety net, on the raw transcript and again after any AI cleanup, so cleanup cannot undo a fix. OpenAI's Whisper prompting guide says Whisper may get uncommon proper nouns wrong, such as names of products, companies or people. That is exactly the gap a dictionary fills.

Three examples: a name, a product, an acronym

The first example is mine, straight from my own dictionary. The other two are made up to show the pattern; use whatever spelling your own raw transcript shows. One entry per mishearing, copied from History, is the whole technique.

A person's name

Dictionary entry: My name, the way the microphone hears it and the way I spell it.

Heard: riley
Replace with: Ryleigh

What happens: Every riley in a dictation is written Ryleigh, and Ryleigh is also handed to Whisper as a word to listen for. Case is off by default, so Riley and RILEY match too.

A product name

Say your team's product is called Larkspan, and the raw transcript keeps showing two words.

Dictionary entry: A made-up product name that the speech model splits in two.

Heard: lark span
Replace with: Larkspan

What happens: The two words become your one-word product name, and Larkspan joins the list that primes Whisper. Dictionaries change phrases as well as single words.

Some brands are covered before you start. A fresh install begins with a few entries the speech model reliably gets wrong: iPhone, iPad, iMac, AirPods, macOS, YouTube, Wi-Fi and the app's own name. They are added only when you have no entries of your own.

An acronym

Say you talk about OKRs all day, and the raw transcript shows something like okay ours.

Dictionary entry: A made-up mishearing of an acronym.

Heard: okay ours
Replace with: OKRs

What happens: The phrase becomes OKRs. Because Whole word is on, the entry only fires on the phrase standing on its own.

Pick a Heard that you would never say for real, because the entry fires every time it matches. Acronyms also get along with Intelligent Insert: when you dictate into the middle of a sentence, words whose second letter is also a capital keep their capitals. One size rule applies to all three: a Replace with of one character, or longer than 40 characters, is not used to prime Whisper, though the replacement still handles it.

Whole word, Case, order and more than one dictionary

Most entries need nothing but Heard and Replace with. The options are there for the cases where they do not. Leave Whole word on and Case off unless you have a reason not to.

  • Whole word (default on). Heard only matches when it stands on its own, so an entry for cat leaves catalog alone. Turn it off to match inside longer words too, for a prefix or a fragment.
  • Case (default off). iphone, Iphone and IPHONE all match. Turn it on to match only the exact capitalization in Heard. A row shows an Aa tag when Case is on.
  • Order. Entries run top to bottom, so when two of them touch the same words, the higher one goes first. Drag the handle at the start of a row to move it.
  • Folders. Several spellings that lead to the same word fold into one row, like Ryleigh, 3 spellings. Open it to add or remove spellings.

You can keep more than one dictionary. Start with General and press New Dictionary for others, such as Work. Each has its own switch, so you can pause a whole set without deleting anything, and its menu has Export Dictionary, Show in Finder and Delete Dictionary. In the editor of any dictation mode, the Dictionaries card has Use every dictionary that's turned on, on by default; turn it off to pick exactly which dictionaries that mode runs. All of them live in one file, vocabulary.json, inside the app's own container on your Mac, and nothing syncs it. Export Preset, in Settings, Advanced, Backup & sharing, carries your dictionaries to another Mac along with your modes and settings.

Add a word without opening the Dictionaries page

Typing entries by hand is the slow way. You can teach a spelling by voice, from any app.

Say: With the right spelling selected anywhere, after tapping the Quick Edit key, Right Option by default.

add this to my dictionary

What happens: The card says Added, with the word in quotes. It goes into your first dictionary exactly as written. For a single word of three letters or more, the app also maps the split a recognizer tends to hear, like you tube for YouTube, and up to four likely mishearings from the cleanup model. If the word is already there, it says so.

The Quick Edit listening card reading: Listening for your edit, with the spoken instruction underneath.
Figure 2. The Quick Edit card listening. Over a selected word, say add this to my dictionary, and the card says Added.
  • From a correction. Right after a dictation lands, say replace, then the wrong word, then with, then the right word. Fix the same mishearing twice and the Home page shows “Make this correction stick?”, and Add it puts the fix in a dictionary named Learned, which also primes Whisper. Only fixes of up to three words are learned.
  • From an entry. Generate variations, on any row or folder, asks the model on your Mac for likely mishearings of that word and maps them to it. Plurals, truncations and real words are filtered out.
  • From your history. With Suggest fixes from my dictations on, the default, the app looks through up to 400 recent dictations for words it keeps having to recapitalize. A fix seen at least three times shows under Suggested for you with its count, up to eight at a time. The plus button adds it; the x button means it is never suggested again. Nothing is added until you say so.
YapToText's Dictionaries page: suggested fixes such as thursday to Thursday, and the General dictionary with iPhone and Wi-Fi.
Figure 3. Suggested for you lists fixes that keep coming back in your own dictations, each with a count. Below it, the General dictionary pairs what was heard with the spelling you want.

Compare Apple's options with YapToText

Checked October 5, 2026, on Apple's support pages, and against YapToText's own help pages. Features change, so check before you rely on one.

Apple DictationVoice ControlYapToText
Where it livesSystem Settings, Keyboard, DictationSystem Settings, Accessibility, Voice ControlThe Dictionaries page
A word listNone among its settingsCustom vocabulary, up to 1,000 termsEntries with Heard and Replace with, in one or more dictionaries
Add a selected word by voiceNoSay Add to vocabularyQuick Edit, then say add this to my dictionary
Fix one word on the pageClick a blue underline, pick an alternativeNot compared hereSay replace, the wrong word, with, the right word
Works alongside standard DictationIt is standard DictationNo: standard Dictation is off while it is onIts own speech model; does not use Apple's Dictation

Text Replacements sit outside this table because Apple documents them for text in general, not for Dictation. If you want to stay on Apple's Dictation, test a Text Replacement; if you want a real word list, Voice Control or YapToText has one. YapToText is free on the Mac App Store.

What each one cannot do

  • Apple Dictation. No word list among its settings, and a blue-underline fix corrects the page, not the next dictation. Apple's Text Replacements page does not say they apply to dictated text.
  • Voice Control. Standard Dictation is not available while it is on, and the custom vocabulary works only in languages that support one.
  • YapToText, exact spellings. Heard has to match what Whisper wrote. If it hears the word differently on different days, add each spelling, or press Generate variations.
  • YapToText, the prompt budget. About 200 characters. Your dictionary terms go first, then distinctive words from your recent dictations, so a long dictionary does not all fit; the replacements still run on every entry.
  • YapToText, words not grammar. Dictionaries change words and phrases. Punctuation by voice is a job for spoken commands.
  • YapToText, a name at the start. A name that starts your dictation in the middle of a sentence is lowercased by Intelligent Insert, unless its second letter is a capital. Select it and say capitalize this with Quick Edit.
  • YapToText, the Mac. It needs an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later, and nothing is claimed for Intel Macs.

A word that comes out wrong the same way every time can be taught; a random mistake cannot.

If a word still comes out wrong

Climb this ladder, smallest step first:

  1. Copy the raw transcript. In History, Show pipeline details shows what Whisper heard. Use that exact spelling in Heard.
  2. Check the switches. The dictionary must be switched on, and the mode must use it.
  3. Check the options. Whole word can block a match inside a longer word, and Case can block a different capitalization.
  4. Check the order. An entry higher up may rewrite the same words first. Drag yours above it.
  5. Add more spellings. Add the other ways Whisper writes the word, or press Generate variations.
  6. Fix the sound. If many words go wrong, not one, start with the microphone; the accuracy guide has the order.
  7. Tell me. Open a GitHub issue with the word, the raw transcript and the entry.

The Dictionaries guide covers every button on the page.

The short version

  • Apple Dictation. No word list; fix blue underlines as you go, and test Text Replacements in your app.
  • Voice Control. A real custom vocabulary, but standard Dictation is off while it runs.
  • YapToText. Copy the raw spelling from History into Heard, your spelling into Replace with, and press Add.
  • No typing needed. Select the word, tap Right Option and say add this to my dictionary.

Fix a misheard name once, and it stays fixed.

If a word will not stick, or this page does not match what you see, open an issue on GitHub. Every one gets read.

Download YapToText on the Mac App StoreDownload for free. No account, nothing locked, macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. Source on GitHub.

About the author. Ryleigh Newman is a developer whose hands make typing difficult and who dictates every day with YapToText, the app this site describes. Facts about other apps come from their own sites, with the date they were read. More about the project.

Sources

Questions

How do I add words to Mac dictation?

Apple's Dictation has no word list in its settings. In YapToText, open the Dictionaries page, type the spelling the speech model produces in Heard and your spelling in Replace with, and press Add. Or select the right spelling, tap Right Option and say add this to my dictionary.

Why does dictation keep misspelling my name on my Mac?

OpenAI's Whisper prompting guide says Whisper may get uncommon proper nouns wrong, including names of people. In YapToText, add the spelling it produces as Heard and your name as Replace with; your name is then also used to prime Whisper.

Do Text Replacements work with Mac dictation?

Apple documents Text Replacements for text in many Mac apps, and its page does not say whether they apply to dictated text, so test one in your app. You can apply them to existing text with Edit, Substitutions, Show Substitutions, then Replace in Selection.

Can Mac dictation learn custom vocabulary?

Voice Control can: Apple says you can add up to 1,000 terms in System Settings, Accessibility, Voice Control. Standard Dictation is not available while Voice Control is on.

Does my YapToText dictionary leave my Mac?

No. Dictionaries live in one file, vocabulary.json, in the app's own container on your Mac, and nothing syncs it.