← Back to Blog

Short answer: Say "open quote" before the quoted words and "close quote" or "end quote" after them. Parentheses work the same way: "open parenthesis" and "close parenthesis." Nearly every common symbol has a spoken name, including "hyphen," "slash," "ampersand," and "at sign." Pause briefly before and after the command so it is not typed as a literal word.

Dictation handles ordinary sentences well. Where most people get stuck is the first time they need to quote someone, wrap a phrase in parentheses, or drop an ampersand into a company name. The words come out fine, and then the symbol either never appears or shows up as the literal word "quote" sitting in the middle of the sentence.

The good news is that almost every symbol on your keyboard has a spoken name that dictation understands. This guide covers the commands for quotation marks, brackets, dashes, and the rest of the special-character family, plus the small speaking habits that decide whether the command fires or gets transcribed as text. Everything here applies to dictation on both Mac and iPhone.

Why symbols are harder than words

When you dictate a sentence, the transcription engine is doing pattern matching against natural language. "Meet me at the coffee shop" is an ordinary English sentence, and ordinary English is exactly what the system is trained to expect.

Symbols break that pattern in two ways. First, most of them are silent in normal speech. Nobody pronounces the parentheses when reading a sentence aloud, so the system has to be told explicitly where they go. Second, the spoken names of symbols are themselves ordinary English words. "Quote," "period," "dash," and "at" all appear constantly in normal sentences. The system has to decide, every time, whether you meant the command or the word.

That decision is driven mostly by context and timing. Say "open quote" smoothly inside a stream of words and it usually registers as a command. Say it hesitantly, half-swallowed, or with noise in the background, and it may land as literal text. Most of the fixes in this guide come down to giving the system a cleaner signal about which one you meant.

Quotation marks: the commands that matter most

Quotes are the special character people need most often, whether it is dialogue in a story, a quoted phrase in an email, or a term you want to set apart. The commands are:

A full quoted sentence sounds like this when dictated:

She said open quote I will send the contract tomorrow period close quote

Which produces: She said, "I will send the contract tomorrow."

Two details are worth knowing. Most systems insert curly ("smart") quotes by default because that is what your text app is usually configured to produce. If you need straight quotes for code or data, that is a setting in the destination app, not something you control from dictation. And possessives on names ("James's report") are usually handled automatically as well; you rarely need to say "apostrophe" out loud unless the system got it wrong.

Single quotes and nested quotes

For a quote inside a quote, the commands are "open single quote" and "close single quote." In practice, nesting spoken quote commands two levels deep is where most people give up and reach for the keyboard, and that is a reasonable call. Dictate the sentence without the inner quotes, then add them by hand in two keystrokes. Voice is for the words; the keyboard is still allowed to exist.

Brackets and parentheses

All three bracket families follow the same open/close pattern as quotes:

The parenthesis commands are the ones you will actually use, since parenthetical asides are common in ordinary writing. A dictated example:

The quarterly numbers open parenthesis before adjustments close parenthesis look strong period

Which produces: The quarterly numbers (before adjustments) look strong.

One habit helps here: decide that the aside is parenthetical before you start the sentence. If you bolt on "open parenthesis" as an afterthought mid-sentence, you tend to hesitate, and hesitation is exactly what causes the command to be typed as a literal word.

Dashes, hyphens, and slashes

This family causes more confusion than any other because the names are close cousins:

If you dictate file paths or URLs with any regularity, the slash commands matter, but strings like web addresses have their own set of pitfalls beyond individual symbols. We covered that whole category, including why symbol commands inside addresses often pick up unwanted spaces, in our guide to dictating email addresses and URLs.

The full spoken-symbol reference

Here is the wider set of symbol names that dictation systems commonly recognize. Say the name where you want the character to appear:

You do not need to memorize this list. The names are almost all the same names you would use if you were reading the symbol aloud to another person, which is exactly the point: say what the symbol is called, and the system inserts it.

Numbers, currency amounts, and dates follow their own set of rules that interact with these symbol commands, and getting them right matters more because number errors are silent. We wrote a separate guide on how to dictate numbers and dates that covers decimals, currency, and phone numbers in detail.

When the command gets typed as a word

The single most common complaint about symbol dictation: you say "close quote" and the text now reads close quote. Three causes account for nearly all of it.

1. You ran the command into the surrounding words

The system separates commands from content partly by prosody, meaning the rhythm and timing of your speech. The fix is a brief beat before and after the command. Not a long dramatic pause, just the small gap you would leave when reading punctuation aloud to someone taking notes. "She said (beat) open quote (beat) I will be there" registers cleanly. The same habit fixes literal "new paragraph" text, which we covered in how to dictate a new line or new paragraph.

2. Your dictation language variant does not match how you speak

Symbol names differ between English variants. "Period" is American; "full stop" is British. If your dictation language is set to a variant that does not match the names you use, some commands will be transcribed as words rather than executed. Check that your dictation language matches both your accent and your vocabulary, and use that variant's command names.

3. Background noise blurred the command

A command is a short utterance, and short utterances are the first casualties of a noisy room or a Bluetooth microphone in low-quality mode. If commands fail mostly in one location or with one headset, the microphone path is your problem, not your pronunciation.

Symbols you should type, not speak

Honesty helps here: some character work is faster on the keyboard, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. Type rather than dictate when you need:

The practical division of labor: speak the sentences, type the symbols that come in clusters. A single quote pair or parenthesis inside prose is well worth speaking. A line of code is not.

Recurring symbol strings: stop dictating them entirely

If the same symbol-laden string comes up in your writing every day, the best answer is neither speaking it character by character nor typing it out. It is a replacement rule.

Voice Keyboard Pro, our voice-to-text app for Mac and iPhone, includes Smart Vocabulary, a personal dictionary with replacement rules. You define a spoken phrase once and map it to the exact text you want, symbols included. Say "my work email" and get anna.chen@example.com. Say "the docs link" and get the full URL with every slash in place. The string is inserted exactly as you saved it, every time, with no per-character narration and no chance of a misheard ampersand.

On the Mac, Voice Keyboard Pro lives in the menu bar: hold a hotkey, speak, release, and the text appears at your cursor in whatever app you are using. Its transcription engine also handles punctuation automatically from the structure of your sentences, so in everyday writing you rarely need spoken commands at all. Quotes around dialogue, parentheses around asides, and commas simply appear where the sentence implies them, and you only reach for explicit commands in the edge cases.

Mac vs. iPhone: small differences worth knowing

The command vocabulary is essentially the same on both platforms, but the surrounding experience differs.

On the Mac, built-in dictation runs in whatever text field has focus, and symbol commands behave consistently across apps. The main saboteur is app-level autocorrect or smart-substitution settings, which can convert your straight quotes to curly ones (or vice versa) after dictation inserts them. If your quotes look wrong, check the app's substitution settings before blaming dictation.

On the iPhone, dictation adds automatic punctuation more aggressively, which sometimes collides with your explicit commands: you say "close quote" a half-second after a pause and the system has already inserted a period. The fix is to keep speaking through the quoted material without long gaps, then place the command immediately after the final word. With a third-party voice keyboard like Voice Keyboard Pro's iPhone keyboard, there is also Voice Edit: if a symbol lands wrong, you can speak the correction ("put quotes around the second sentence" style fixes) rather than fishing for the cursor position with your fingertip.

A 30-second practice drill

Open a notes app and dictate these three sentences. They cover quotes, parentheses, and the most common symbols, and they will tell you immediately whether your setup and timing are working:

  1. "The client said open quote we need it by Friday close quote so the timeline is fixed period"
  2. "Revenue grew twelve percent open parenthesis year over year close parenthesis which beat the forecast period"
  3. "Email the file to design at example dot com and copy Smith ampersand Jones period"

If all three come out clean, you know the commands. If a command lands as literal text, slow down just around the command word and try again. Nearly everyone gets to reliable symbol dictation within a few minutes of deliberate practice, because the skill is timing, not memorization.

Frequently asked questions

How do I dictate quotation marks on my iPhone?

The same way as on a Mac: say "open quote" before the quoted words and "close quote" or "end quote" after them. Tap the microphone on the keyboard, speak the sentence with the commands in place, and the marks are inserted around the quoted text.

Why does dictation type the word "quote" instead of the symbol?

Usually timing: the command was run together with the surrounding words, so the system treated it as content. Leave a brief beat before and after the command. If it keeps happening, check that your dictation language variant matches the command names you are using, and test in a quieter environment.

Can I dictate an em dash?

Yes, say "em dash." Be aware that some apps auto-convert double hyphens to em dashes anyway, so you may see the right character even when you said "dash dash."

Do I need to dictate apostrophes in contractions?

No. Contractions like "can't," "won't," and "it's" are recognized as spoken words and punctuated automatically. You only need the "apostrophe" command for unusual possessives the system gets wrong.

Is there a way to skip symbol commands entirely?

For everyday prose, yes: use a dictation tool with automatic punctuation, like Voice Keyboard Pro, which places quotes, commas, and parentheses from sentence structure so you can just talk. For recurring symbol-heavy strings, set up a Smart Vocabulary replacement rule once and trigger it with a spoken phrase. Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier with daily limits, and Pro is $4.99/month or $34.99/year.

Keep reading