Dictave
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Say “full stop”
Dictave writes the punctuation you speak — “comma”, “full stop”, “new line” — instead of guessing where your sentences end. This is an old idea, and we chose it on purpose.
Punctuation is meaning. “Let's eat, grandma” is an invitation; without the comma it is a crime. When software guesses your punctuation, it is guessing your meaning — usually well, occasionally catastrophically, and always silently. The failure mode of a guess is that you stop trusting the page and start proofreading everything, which spends the very minutes dictation saved.
Speaking your punctuation feels stilted for about ten minutes. Then it becomes rhythm. Dictating machines with spoken punctuation are as old as dictation itself: a century ago people spoke letters to a stenographer exactly this way — “regret to inform you comma” — because it put the author's intent on the page, not the transcriber's interpretation. The convention survived because it works.
There is also a quieter benefit. Composing aloud with punctuation makes you finish your sentences. The full stop, said out loud, is a small commitment — you hear yourself complete a thought before starting the next. Writers who dictate this way often find their spoken drafts have better bones than their typed ones: shorter sentences, one idea each, because that is how speech with deliberate full stops naturally comes out.
Auto-punctuation is coming to everything, and for casual notes a guess is fine. But when the words are going to another human with your name attached, the punctuation should be yours. Say the comma. It knows where it belongs, because you do.