Spoken commands

Some words in a dictation are instructions rather than text. Herga follows them and leaves them out of the result. When you’re talking about one of these phrases, it stays as words: “we need a new line of products” isn’t a line break.

Line breaks

Say “new line”, “line break”, “next line”, “new paragraph”, “paragraph break” or “next paragraph”. A leading verb is fine too: “add a new line”, “go to the next line”. Saying “new line” twice makes a paragraph break.

Lists

Start a dictation, or a new sentence, with “make a list of”, “create a list of” or “add a bullet list of”, then say the items separated by short pauses.

“make a list of flights, hotel and the rental car”

- Flights
- Hotel
- The rental car

Changed your mind? End with “remove the last item” or “remove that list”.

Changing your mind

You don’t need to start over when you misspeak. Say the correction and Herga keeps only the final version:

• “no no”, “no actually”, “no wait”, “wait no”, “sorry, I mean”
• “send it Tuesday, or was it Wednesday”
• “scratch that”, “let me start over”, “make that”

Repeats, stutters and restarts are removed too. If you’d rather keep everything you said, turn off Remove self-corrections in Settings › Transcription & refinement.

Quotes, brackets and braces

Say the opening and closing marks:

Say	Get
“open quote … close quote” (or “unquote”)	"…"
“open paren … close paren”	(…)
“open bracket … close bracket”	[…]
“open curly brace … close curly brace”	{…}
“open angle bracket … close angle bracket”	<…>

A bare “quote”, “parentheses” or “brackets” works when you say it twice, once to open and once to close.

Slashes, pipes and carets

Say	Get
“and slash or”	and/or
“backslash”	\
“x caret 2”	x^2
“pipe” or “vertical bar”	|

When the word is clearly used as a verb, it stays a word: “pipe it into the file”, “slash the budget”. And “carrot” is always a vegetable.

Spelling things out

To spell a username, a code or an unusual name, say the letters one at a time. Herga joins three or more spelled letters into one word.

• Say “capital” before a letter to capitalize it: “capital C” becomes C.
• Numbers and symbols said in the same run join in too: underscore, dash, hyphen, period, dot, slash, at sign, dollar sign, percent sign, pound sign, hash, ampersand, asterisk, plus sign, question mark and exclamation point.

“capital C, H, E, N, E, Y, 0 0 2 1, exclamation point”

becomes CHENEY0021!.

Paste from your clipboard

Say “paste from clipboard” anywhere in a dictation and whatever is on your clipboard goes in at that spot:

“here’s the link paste from clipboard let me know what you think”

If you say only “paste from clipboard”, Herga pastes the clipboard as it is, including images and rich text.

Switch writing style

Start a dictation by naming a writing style and Herga uses it for that dictation, whatever app you’re in:

• “use formal mode”, “use the casual style”
• “switch to formal”
• “make this sound a little more casual”
• “I’d like this to be more formal”

“Formal” also matches a style called Professional, and “casual” matches Informal or Relaxed. The instruction itself is left out of the text. The pill shows the style’s name and plays a short sound so you know it switched.