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Short answer: Say "caps" immediately before a word to capitalize it, "caps on" and "caps off" to Title Case a run of words, "all caps" before a word for FULL uppercase, and "no caps" to force lowercase. Sentence-starting capitals happen automatically after you speak ending punctuation.

You dictate "send the report to pat before the offsite" and get exactly that: lowercase pat, lowercase offsite. Dictation handled the sentence fine and fumbled the capitals. Almost everyone who dictates regularly hits this, decides capitals are something dictation just cannot do, and resigns themselves to a manual cleanup pass.

Capitals are actually one of the most controllable parts of dictation. There is a small set of spoken commands that cover every capitalization pattern you will ever need, plus one underlying rule that explains why sentence capitals sometimes fail. This guide covers all of it, for Mac and iPhone, in about a five-minute read.

The one rule to understand first: sentence capitals follow punctuation

Before the commands, the mechanism. Dictation capitalizes the start of a sentence because it saw the previous sentence end. When you say "period" or automatic punctuation inserts one, the next word gets a capital letter. No sentence ending, no capital.

This explains the single most common capitalization complaint: you dictate three sentences without speaking any punctuation, get one long run-on, and everything after the first word is lowercase. The dictation system is not broken; it never received a signal that a new sentence started. Speak your periods (or turn on automatic punctuation) and sentence capitals come along for free.

If your dictation is not even capitalizing after periods, that is a settings or software problem rather than a technique problem, and we have separate deep-dive fixes for Mac dictation not capitalizing and iPhone dictation not capitalizing.

The four caps commands

These commands work in Apple's built-in dictation on both Mac and iPhone. Say them as part of your dictation stream, right where you want them to act.

1. "Caps" — capitalize the next word

Say "caps" immediately before a single word to capitalize its first letter.

This is the workhorse command. Names, product names, places, the word after a colon in a heading: one syllable and the word is capitalized.

2. "Caps on" / "caps off" — Title Case a run of words

Everything between "caps on" and "caps off" gets Title Case, meaning every word is capitalized.

Use it for document titles, email subject lines, book and movie names, and multi-word product names. Remember to say "caps off" or the rest of your dictation will arrive looking Like A Ransom Note.

3. "All caps" — full uppercase

Say "all caps" before a word to uppercase the whole word. For a longer stretch, "all caps on" and "all caps off" work like the title-case pair.

This is also the practical way to dictate acronyms the system does not already know. Well-known ones like NASA or FBI usually come out correctly on their own; obscure internal ones often need "all caps."

4. "No caps" — force lowercase

The mirror image. "No caps" before a word forces it lowercase even where a capital would normally appear, and "no caps on" / "no caps off" lowercases a run. Useful for stylized brand names, usernames, and email addresses, where a helpful automatic capital is exactly what you do not want. Dictating full addresses and URLs has its own set of tricks, which we covered in How to dictate email addresses and URLs.

Quick reference table

The technique that makes commands land: the pause beat

The most common failure with caps commands is not saying the wrong words; it is saying them too fast. If "caps" blurs into the surrounding speech, the recognizer may transcribe the literal word "caps" into your text instead of executing it.

The fix is a tiny pause, a beat of maybe a quarter second, on each side of the command: "send it to … caps … pat." That separation tells the recognizer it heard a command, not content. The same habit fixes most problems with spoken punctuation and formatting commands generally, including the symbol commands we covered in How to dictate quotation marks and special characters.

If commands are still coming out as literal words after you add the pause, check two things:

Why names keep coming out lowercase (and the real fix)

Here is the frustrating pattern: you can say "caps" before your colleague's name, and it works, but you should not have to say it every single time. Why does dictation keep lowercasing names in the first place?

Because capitalization is a guess based on context and frequency. Common words that happen to also be names, like "pat," "will," "mark," "amber," or "june," are statistically far more often ordinary words than names, so the system defaults to lowercase unless the sentence makes the name reading obvious. And rare or foreign names often lose out to a more frequent lowercase near-homophone entirely, which means you get the wrong word and the wrong case.

On stock dictation, your options are limited: add people to Contacts, which helps for names the system can match, or set up Text Replacement rules, which are blunt instruments. The structural problem is that built-in dictation never learns from your corrections. You can fix "pat" to "Pat" fifty times and the fifty-first dictation will still guess lowercase.

This is exactly the class of problem Voice Keyboard Pro was designed to fix. Its Smart Vocabulary is a personal dictionary with replacement rules: tell it once that "pat" in your world means "Pat," that your product is "LaunchKit" with an internal capital, or that your team is "SRE" in caps, and every future transcription applies your rules automatically. The capitals stop being something you dictate and start being something the system just knows. Instead of narrating capitalization word by word, you speak naturally and the text arrives already formatted the way you write.

Capitals in real documents: patterns worth stealing

Email subject lines

Wrap the subject in a caps-on pair: "caps on budget review follow up caps off." Or skip title case entirely; sentence-case subject lines are standard in most workplaces now, and those need no commands at all.

Headings while drafting

Dictate the heading with "caps on … caps off," then "new paragraph," then the body. The paragraph break gives you your automatic capital for the first body sentence.

Acronym-heavy work

If you say the acronym as a word ("nasa"), well-known ones capitalize themselves. For internal jargon, either use "all caps" each time or, far better, add the term to your personal dictionary once so it always renders correctly.

Legal and formal writing

Defined terms like "the Agreement" and "the Company" need mid-sentence capitals constantly. Saying "caps" dozens of times per document gets old fast; this is another case where a replacement rule that always capitalizes your defined terms pays for itself in the first afternoon.

Stylized lowercase

Brand names like "iPhone" and usernames like "jsmith" resist automatic capitals in both directions. "No caps" handles the one-off; a dictionary entry handles the recurring.

Mac vs. iPhone: small differences worth knowing

The command vocabulary above is the same on both platforms, but the surrounding behavior differs a little.

On Mac, dictation drops text into whatever app holds your cursor, and some apps apply their own autocapitalize or autocorrect on top of what dictation inserts. If capitals look wrong in exactly one app, suspect that app's text settings rather than dictation. For the full command vocabulary beyond capitals, see our complete Mac dictation commands list.

On iPhone, the keyboard's own auto-capitalization setting (Settings → General → Keyboard → Auto-Capitalization) interacts with dictation output. With it on, you get a safety net that catches missed sentence capitals; with it off, dictation's own decisions stand alone. Most people should leave it on.

With Voice Keyboard Pro, capitalization is handled for you. On Mac you hold a hotkey, speak naturally without narrating any commands, and release; sentence capitals, names in your Smart Vocabulary, and punctuation arrive already applied. On iPhone, the keyboard's built-in mic works the same way in any app, and if a capital does come out wrong, Voice Edit lets you fix it by speaking the change ("capitalize atlas") instead of fishing for the cursor with your fingertip.

A 60-second practice drill

Commands become automatic only after your mouth has said them a few times. Open Notes and dictate this, commands included:

"caps on quarterly planning notes caps off new paragraph the meeting with caps dana is moved to friday period this is all caps urgent period"

You should get a title-cased heading, a paragraph break, a capitalized name, and an uppercase URGENT. If any command came out as a literal word, slow down and add the pause beat around it, then run the drill once more. Two passes is usually all it takes.

The bottom line

Capital letters are fully dictatable: "caps" for a word, "caps on / caps off" for titles, "all caps" for uppercase, "no caps" for lowercase, and spoken sentence punctuation for everything automatic. Add the quarter-second pause around commands and the failure rate drops to nearly zero.

But notice what all those commands have in common: they make you the typesetter. Every "caps" you speak is a small tax on your train of thought, paid because the system cannot learn that you write "Pat," "LaunchKit," and "SRE." If you dictate more than occasionally, a tool that learns your vocabulary once beats narrating capitals forever. Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier with daily limits, so you can load your names and terms into Smart Vocabulary and see your text arrive correctly capitalized without saying a single command. Pro is $4.99/month or $34.99/year when the daily limit starts feeling small.