Writing Tools
Writing Tools are more than cleanup. They polish your natural speech into clean text, and they understand voice commands. Say "translate this to French", "make it shorter", or "rewrite as a bullet list" and it just happens. Think of it as a writing companion that listens, tidies up, and follows instructions.
When you speak, you don't speak in perfect sentences. You say "um", pause mid-thought, restart, skip punctuation, and trail off. That is normal. Writing Tools take the raw transcription and clean it up before the text is inserted. And when you need more than cleanup, just tell them what to do.
The result: you dictate a quick thought and get a polished sentence. Dictate a paragraph and get something you would be comfortable sending as an email. Or select existing text, say what you want changed, and it is rewritten on the spot.
Before and After
What you say:
"So um I was thinking we could like maybe move the meeting to Thursday instead of um Wednesday because I have a conflict"
What gets inserted:
I was thinking we could move the meeting to Thursday instead of Wednesday because I have a conflict.
What you say:
"Hey can you um send me the the report when you get a chance I need it for the uh the presentation tomorrow morning thanks"
What gets inserted:
Hey, can you send me the report when you get a chance? I need it for the presentation tomorrow morning. Thanks.
What you say:
"Note to self buy milk eggs bread and also pick up the dry cleaning before five"
What gets inserted:
Note to self: buy milk, eggs, bread, and also pick up the dry cleaning before five.
The Tools
Each one is a separate switch in the app, so you can keep the parts you want and turn off the rest.
- Clean up. Removes filler words ("um", "uh", "like", "you know"), drops accidental repetitions ("the the"), adds punctuation and capitalisation, and fixes grammar.
- Add structure. Reads what you said and lays it out as paragraphs or a list when that is what it actually is.
- Edit by voice. Long-press the bar and say how to change your text. "Make it shorter." "Translate to Spanish." "Turn this into bullet points."
- Suggestions. Select a word or phrase and get instant corrections or better-fitting alternatives.
- Note summaries. Every note you save gets a short title and summary, so your history is searchable at a glance.
What They Will Not Do
- They do not change the meaning of your words
- They do not add content you did not say
- They do not translate between languages unless you ask
- They do not store or learn from your transcriptions
- They do not sanitise your language. Profanity comes through as you said it.
Sounds Human, Not AI
AI cleanup tools leave fingerprints. The em-dashes everywhere. The faintly formal vocabulary. The cadence that doesn't quite sound like a person wrote it.
Writing Tools are tuned against that. Casual text stays casual. Professional text reads like a careful human, not a corporate template. The output should read like you, not like a model wrote it for you.
Context-Aware
Writing Tools are not running in isolation. They see the text around your cursor and anything you have selected. This means:
- Inserted text matches the capitalisation of its position in the sentence
- Punctuation adapts to context, so no full stop if you are mid-sentence
- Tone and formality match what you have already written
- List formatting is continued when you are adding to a list
Your recent dictations count too. If you used a specific term two dictations ago, that context carries forward.
Read more about context-aware editing.
Writing Style
Tones shape style per app. Writing Style shapes everything underneath them.
In the Diction app, open Writing Style and describe what your work is about and how you write. Software engineer who uses British English. Sales lead who talks to enterprise customers. Doctor who dictates patient notes. A few sentences are plenty.
Writing Tools read it on every cleanup. Brand names and jargon come through. Domain language stays in the right register. Your spellings match what you actually use. The same raw dictation produces different results for different people, because their Writing Style is different.
Writing Style and Tones stack. Writing Style is the baseline that follows you everywhere. A tone is the local style for the app you are in right now. Set "British English, technical writing" as your Writing Style, then a Professional tone for Mail and a Casual tone for Messages, and your dictations come out as British technical email or British casual messages without you doing anything.
Write it once and it applies everywhere Writing Tools run.
Tones
Set a writing style per app. Professional for email, Casual for messages, or write your own instruction. Diction remembers which tone goes with which app and applies it automatically.
My Words
Add names, jargon, and product terms that speech models keep getting wrong. Diction uses your custom words to improve both raw transcription and Writing Tools accuracy.
Where the Work Happens
One picker in the app decides this, and it is the first thing on the Writing Tools screen.
- Diction Cloud gives you the full set. Your text goes to a Diction server, the tools run there, and the polished version comes back encrypted.
- On device keeps everything on your iPhone. Nothing you say is sent anywhere. Today this covers Clean up only, and it needs Apple Intelligence.
- Off writes down exactly what you said, with no model in between.
If you run your own server, the tools run there instead, on hardware you control.
Writing Tools are on by default for Diction One subscribers. When they are active it is the transcription text that gets processed, never the original audio. Audio is discarded immediately after transcription either way.
Best For
- Emails and messages where you want polished output without editing
- Long-form dictation where filler words would clutter the text
- Professional contexts where grammar and punctuation matter
- Quick notes where you want clean text without going back to fix it