Teach it once, it stops mishearing you.
Every dictation app gets words wrong. The question is what happens the second time, and for most of them the answer is nothing.
The same mistake, every day
This is the thing that wears people down. Not that a dictation app misheard a word once, but that it mishears the same word every single time, and there is nowhere to tell it otherwise. A library name, a colleague's surname, the product you have shipped four hundred times. You fix it by hand, and tomorrow you fix it again.
Over a month that is not a small tax. It is also demoralising in a specific way: the tool is not learning anything from you, so your relationship with it never improves.
What Teach does
Ship the Q3 roadmap before Friday.
- Select the word that came out wrong, in Zumbo's own history view.
- The Teach form opens with what it heard on the left and an empty box for what you meant.
- Type the correct spelling.
- Press Replace everywhere and teach. The occurrences in front of you are corrected and the word is remembered.
If the change is a one off, Replace here fixes just that instance without teaching anything. The taught word gets a dashed green underline so you can see what it now knows.
Why this beats a list
macOS does have a custom vocabulary, hidden under Voice Control, capped at a thousand terms you type in advance. It works. The problem is the moment it asks you to act: you have to know, before you start, which words will come out wrong. Nobody knows that. You find out mid sentence, and mid sentence you are not going to open System Settings and navigate four levels into Accessibility.
Teach is at the other end of the same problem. It acts on a mistake that has already happened, at the moment you noticed it, which is the only moment you were ever going to do anything about it. The list still gets built, it just gets built out of your actual work rather than your predictions.
What it is not
It is not text replacement. macOS has that under Keyboard, and it swaps one string for another after the words are already recognised, which cannot help when the recogniser was never going to produce the right shape in the first place. Teach changes what gets heard.
It is also not a model that retrains on your voice in some larger sense. It is a specific correction for a specific word, stored on your Mac, applied from then on. That is a deliberately small claim and it is the one that is true.
Where it goes
Nowhere. The corrections live on your Mac alongside everything else. There is no account, no sync and no server, so your vocabulary does not travel between machines and nobody else receives it. You can see, edit and delete what you have taught in Settings, under Dictionary.
Stacked with the packs
Twenty one vocabulary packs cover the shared language of a field, switched on by what you say you dictate most during setup. Teach covers everything specific to you: internal tools, customers, colleagues, the codename nobody outside your company has heard. After a week of ordinary use the two together look like the vocabulary of your job.
Related: the 21 vocabulary packs, adding custom words to Mac dictation, and Voice Control's vocabulary workaround.
How long does teaching a word take?
About three seconds. Select the word that came out wrong, type what you meant, press the button. There is no settings pane and no list to maintain.
Does it fix the document I am in?
Yes. Replace everywhere and teach corrects the occurrences in front of you and remembers the word for next time. Replace here fixes just this one if the change is a one off.
Where are the corrections stored?
On your Mac, with everything else. There is no account and no sync, so they do not travel and nobody else receives them.
Is this the same as a custom word list?
No. A list asks you to predict mistakes in advance. Teach acts on a mistake that already happened, which is the only kind you actually know about.
What if I teach it something wrong?
Open Settings, Dictionary, and remove or edit the entry. The list of what you have taught is yours to see and change.
Do the vocabulary packs and Teach conflict?
No, they stack. Packs cover the shared language of a field, Teach covers the words that are specific to you.
Free for 3 days, everything unlocked. Then $15 once. macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon.