How to Use Dictation in DEVONthink

Apple’s Dictation feature has been a great assistive technology on their platforms. Over time it has made its way into general use, e.g., “Hey, Siri…”. It can even be used for text entry in our applications like DEVONthink.

Enabled in System Settings > Keyboard > Dictation, the logical use case for dictation is when composing a document. Start a new rich text or Markdown document, invoke dictation, and you’ve got a virtual assistant “typing” for you. But you can also use dictation in many other text fields in DEVONthink like the Take Note section of the Sorter, or the Finder Comments or Annotations fields in the Info: Reminders & Annotations inspector.

Dictation is best suited for at least a sentence or more. Smaller word fragments can be typed in quickly enough. That being said, you can use dictation in places where you’d enter less text, for example when entering tags, e.g., in the Tags bar. For creating new tags, this could be useful but it isn’t going to make autocompletion suggestions as the characters aren’t being entered one at a time.

If you are running the Pro or Server edition of DEVONthink and have set up access to external AI, use dictation for more efficient AI interactions. In the Chat Assistant, place the cursor in the text field, open dictation, and speak your inquiry. This also works with the Chat - Query or Chat - Continue if smart actions. For AI-powered searches, place the cursor in the toolbar search field, press Return, and click the AI button to open the Search Assistant. Now dictate your query and let AI try to determine the appropriate search for it. As we think faster than we type, compound searches can be dictated more easily.

And while dictation doesn’t always “hear” perfectly, is works well often enough to provide a little less stress on the hands and some quicker entry.

💬 Discuss this post in our user forum.