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Writing styles

You don’t write a text to a friend the way you write a work email. Writing styles let each app sound right. Every style learns on its own from the corrections you make in the apps assigned to it.

Herga starts with one style, Personal, which every app uses. You can have up to six styles. Each keeps its own cache in the cleanup model, which is why the number is limited.

Open Settings › Writing style to manage them:

  • Add a style and give it a name, like Work or Casual.
  • Assign apps by dragging them onto a style or picking one from the list. Apps you haven’t dictated into before show up as New, with a suggested style based on similar apps.
  • Set a default for new apps.

When you move an app to another style, Herga asks whether the app’s past corrections should move with it.

Setting What it does
Punctuation Casual puts commas where you pause, like speech. Standard writes regular prose and is the default. Match my writing copies your own punctuation habits, once you’ve taught Herga.
Keep technical terms exact Leaves code names, commands and identifiers exactly as you said them.
How you write here A short description in your own words, up to 600 characters, like “short and lowercase, no sign-off”. You can dictate it.

The fastest way to teach a style is Teach by replying, a short chat that takes about three minutes. Herga shows you messages from different kinds of conversations, such as a teammate asking for feedback, an email or a code review comment, and you reply the way you normally would, by voice or by typing.

Your replies become examples for that style. At the end you see a summary of the habits Herga picked up, and you can choose Also match my punctuation to turn on Match my writing.

Start it from the style’s page, or from the command palette with ⌘ K › Run style calibration….

Each time you correct a dictation in Captures, the correction becomes an example for the style that dictation used. Recent examples guide cleanup directly. While your Mac is idle, older examples are folded into rules, and a new set of rules only replaces the old one if it does at least as well on your past corrections. Old corrections keep counting instead of falling out of memory.

Begin a dictation with the style’s name, like “use formal mode” or “make this sound more casual”, and that dictation uses the named style. See Spoken commands.