Your words

Use Settings → Dictation → Your words for names and specialist terms that Nock often mishears. These entries are recognition hints, not mandatory substitutions.

Add useful terms

1. Open Settings → Dictation.
2. Add the correctly spelled name or phrase under Your words.
3. Start a new dictation and use that term in a normal sentence.
4. Review the result in the destination app.

Start with a few words that matter in your daily work: a project name, a colleague’s surname, or an abbreviation. Avoid adding whole documents; the list is intended for short terms.

What the dictionary changes

Supported cloud recognizers receive these terms as hints alongside the selected language. Recognition still depends on the audio and surrounding sentence, so a hint cannot guarantee a particular spelling. Apple’s speech fallback does not use this word list in the current implementation.

Nock includes its own name in the hints. The combined list is limited to 100 terms, each up to 50 characters. Keep entries concise and remove obsolete terms if you reach the limit.

Privacy and troubleshooting

Your saved list is local, but hints are sent to the cloud recognizer when that recognition path is used. Do not add confidential text merely as a spelling test.

If a term is still wrong, check the default language and microphone input, then test a short sentence. If you need an exact phrase every time, a replacement is the better tool. For cleanup after recognition, see dictation polish.

Dictionary or replacement?

Use a dictionary hint when the output should depend on what you actually said. For example, adding a surname helps the recognizer prefer that spelling while still producing the rest of the sentence normally.

Use a replacement when a special phrase should always expand into a fixed block, such as “my standard signoff.” The dictionary does not expand snippets, and a replacement cannot fix a trigger the recognizer never heard. If you need both, first test that the trigger is recognized, then add its expansion.

After changing Primary language, retest the terms you rely on. The same saved hint can have different results with another recognizer or language; keep important names under review in the final text.