How to dictate quietly in an open office or co-working space

Can you dictate in an open office or a busy room?

Yes. We use Dictate Safe, a dictation app, ourselves in a busy co-working space, with a lot of buzz around us and background sound like a restaurant’s, and the text comes out as it should. It has held up for us in other busy places too. A cafe is the same kind of room, and so is an open office or a kitchen with the family talking: steady talk all around, with your voice the closest one to the microphone.

The exception is a very loud place. At a music festival, or sitting right beside a loudspeaker with heavy bass, it will not work as well, and the text can come back wrong. A fair guide for everywhere else: if you would have to raise your voice to talk to the person beside you, treat the room as very loud and use the steps further down.

Can you dictate in a whisper?

Yes, as long as the microphone is a little nearer to your mouth. This is our own experience, from using it that way again and again: in an open office we dictate in a voice the colleague at the next desk cannot hear, and the text comes out as it should.

A softer voice and a closer microphone go together: the quieter you speak, the nearer the microphone should be. On a laptop that can mean leaning in a little; with a headset, the microphone already sits by your mouth.

1. Click into the place you want the text to go.
2. Hold the dictation key: Fn on a Mac by default, F9 on Windows.
3. Speak softly, in whole sentences, as you would to someone leaning in to listen.
4. Let go, and the text is typed where you clicked.

Where should the microphone be, and which one?

Close to your mouth. Bringing it nearer does more for you than speaking up, and it is what lets you keep your voice down. HyperPhysics, the physics reference from Georgia State University, puts it this way for a performer on a stage: “When the performer doubles the distance to the microphone, their signal into the microphone drops by 6 decibels while the input from reverberant sound and noises in the auditorium do not change appreciably.” Treat it as a rule of thumb. In a shared room, the noises in the auditorium are your colleagues.

A headset, or a desk microphone you can set near you, is a sensible choice for a room you share. Our view is that a headset is the simplest change to make if you dictate there every day, because the microphone stays at the same distance however you sit.

Choose it in Settings, General, Microphone, or from the Microphone menu under the menu bar icon (the notification area on Windows) without opening the window. Left on Follow the system default, Dictate Safe records from whatever input your computer is set to and switches when you plug a headset in. If the microphone you chose is unplugged, it uses the system default and the Microphone row says so (choosing a microphone).

What should you do when the room is very loud?

Make your voice the loudest thing the microphone hears, or take the dictation somewhere quieter. In order of effort:

• Move the microphone nearer to your mouth, or lean in to the laptop.
• Dictate in shorter pieces, a sentence or two at a time, so a wrong word costs you one sentence to redo.
• Put on a headset, so the microphone sits by your mouth and stays there.
• Step out into a corridor or a meeting room for anything long.

If a result looks wrong, open History and play its recording back. You hear exactly what the microphone heard, which tells you whether to move closer or move rooms.

What should you say out loud, and what should you type?

Say what you would happily say across the desk. Type passwords and client names, and anything else you would rather your neighbour did not hear; a password you dictate is also saved in History like any other words. Speaking softly covers a lot of the rest. Where people already take calls at their desks, a short dictation sounds like one more call, and in a quiet room a word with your neighbours first is kind.

Every dictation is kept in History on your computer, with the recording it came from, and nothing in History is sent anywhere. To erase one, press the bin on it: the text and the recording are erased and cannot be recovered (deleting a dictation). To keep the words and let the audio go, set Keep recordings for on the storage card in Insights to 30 days, 90 days, 6 months or 1 year; it starts at Forever (keeping recordings).

By default the recording stays on your computer. If you switch on cloud speech with your own Groq key, each recording goes to Groq, with whatever else the microphone picked up.

Should you hold the key or go hands-free in a shared room?

For most of what you dictate there, hold the key. Hold-to-talk records only while the key is down and stops the moment you let go, so the people near you are left out between your sentences.

Hands-free keeps listening after you let go: double-tap Fn on a Mac, or tap F9 (or a combination such as Ctrl+Shift+D) quickly on Windows, and press once more to stop. While you pause to think, it hears the room. Use it in a quiet moment, for something long such as an email. If you tend to forget it is on, set Settings, Typing, Stop automatically after to 1, 2, 5 or 15 minutes; it is set to Never unless you change it (hold or hands-free).

How can you try it in your own room in five minutes?

Dictate one sentence three ways and compare what comes back.

1. Open a plain text editor and write down a sentence with a name or a term from your work in it.
2. Hold the dictation key and read it in your normal voice.
3. Bring the microphone closer, or put on a headset, and read it again softly, in the voice you would use beside a colleague.
4. Play a radio or a podcast with people talking, at about the level of your room, and read it softly once more.
5. Compare the three texts, play the recordings back in History, then delete them.