Dictation
Dictation is producing written text by speaking, with the words transcribed in or near real time at the place you are writing. It differs from transcription, which converts an existing recording into text after the fact.
Modern dictation software listens while you speak and inserts text at the cursor of whatever app you are using, so the output lands where an email, document, or message is being written. Quality differs mainly in three places: how accurately speech is recognized, how finished the resulting text is (punctuation, capitalization, numbers), and how reliably it works across applications.
People adopt dictation for speed (speech runs well over 100 words a minute against roughly 31 to 40 for composing at a keyboard), for health reasons such as RSI, or because thinking out loud produces better first drafts.
In Flit
Flit is dictation in this exact sense: hold a key, speak, and finished text lands at your cursor, entirely on your Mac.
What Flit does →Related terms