Dictating your tasks when your hands are full

Look at when you forget things. Getting out of the shower. Carrying the shopping. Driving. Cooking with your hands covered in flour. It’s no coincidence: these are exactly the moments when writing is impossible, so the intention stays in your head — and your head forgets.

Three words are enough

Dictation doesn’t need to be elegant. “Buy more coffee”, “call the insurance company Monday”, “ask for the quote”. What matters is that it’s out of your head and placed somewhere reliable; the wording can be tidied up later, if it needs to be.

One thing worth noting from experience: what dictates best is the mundane stuff, the things you’d never write down because they seem too small. They’re also the ones that keep coming back in the evening.

On the device, or not at all

Most dictation sends the sound to a server to turn it into text. It works well, and it means your voice — and what you say — leaves the phone.

For a few years now, the iPhone has been able to do recognition on the device, with no network, in the languages you’ve installed. The quality is excellent in English, and the sound never leaves. It’s the only form of dictation compatible with an app that sends nothing anywhere.

The corollary is clear: if on-device recognition isn’t available, it’s better to do nothing than to quietly switch to an online service. That’s the choice made in Doui — the app says so, and stops there.

Dictated dates

“Dentist Thursday 9am” is quicker to say than to enter into a date picker. The sentence is first turned into text, then the date is extracted from it: you end up with a dated task without ever opening a calendar.

It works well with common phrasing — tomorrow, Monday, in three days, the 12th. It works less well with unusual phrasing. The fallback is simple: the text stays as written, and you adjust the date with one tap.

One detail that matters: the microphone has to stop

Dictation that keeps listening after your sentence is a bad idea, technically and morally. The microphone opens when you press, closes when you’re done, and iOS’s orange indicator confirms it at the top of the screen. If the indicator stays lit, something’s wrong.

Common questions