Punctuation by voice in note-taking apps

Potok transcribes Russian speech; this site has been translated into English for convenience.

In most note-taking apps, punctuation during dictation has to be either spoken as a separate command or placed by hand. Russian commands are documented for built-in Windows and macOS dictation: 8 marks in all. Apple has automatic punctuation without commands turned off for Russian. The fastest way is to dictate with the Potok app (potok.now): it places punctuation and capital letters at once, without a single command.

Are you dictating a note in Notion, Evernote, OneNote or another app and do not know how to place a comma or period by voice? The note-taking app itself has almost nothing to do with it here: punctuation depends on the operating system and on what you dictate with.

The fastest way: dictate through Potok

The fastest way is to dictate the text of a note with the Potok app: hold the hotkey, say a phrase in ordinary speech, without the words "zapyataya" (comma) or "tochka" (period), and release, and the punctuation and capital letters will be placed by themselves. This works the same in any note-taking app where you can paste text: in Obsidian, Bear, Simplenote and dozens of others, whether or not they have their own dictation. Craft needs separate attention: on Mac the Ctrl+Space shortcut there is already taken by its own command that opens Quick Entry, so in that app you should change Potok's key in the settings in advance. Notion, for comparison, has no official list of hotkeys with Ctrl+Space or Cmd+Space at all: the nearest taken shortcut, Ctrl+Cmd+Space on Mac, opens the system emoji picker and not anything in Notion itself.

The long way: built-in dictation in individual apps

Some note-taking apps have their own dictation, but with caveats. In Evernote you need to press the microphone icon on the editing panel: speech turns into text in real time on desktop, on the web and on mobile, but the list of supported languages and whether Russian is among them are not stated in the help. The separate AI Transcribe feature there transcribes an already finished recording and does not work live. In Microsoft OneNote, dictation is turned on through Home, Dictate, and it requires signing in to Microsoft 365: without a Microsoft 365 subscription, in a separately bought version of Office, it does not exist. Of the full list of languages, Russian is only among the "preview" languages with lower accuracy, not in the main list of 15 languages of full quality. In Google Keep, voice input works only on Android and iPhone or iPad through the Recording button, then Speak: the help has no separate feature for the web version on a computer. In Joplin, built-in dictation exists only in the mobile app on Android and works offline through the Whisper.cpp engine; on desktop and in iOS it officially does not exist. And in the Notes app on Mac and iOS there is no built-in text dictation at all, according to Apple's official help.

What none of these ways solves

Potok is a cloud service: recognition runs on servers in Russia, and it does not work without the internet. It has no voice commands other than dictating the text itself. RemNote also got voice dictation in version 1.18, but it is confirmed only by an entry in the official changelog: there is no separate article with languages and platforms in the help. For free, Potok gives 2500 words per week on one device: for long notes every day the limit may not be enough.

Frequently asked questions

Built-in dictation and Potok

Primary sources: support.microsoft.com · support.apple.com · www.apple.com