Sageio Type
On voice, typing, and getting words right
Notes on dictation, Asian-language voice input, and turning what you say into text you'd actually send.
Where does your voice go? A privacy checklist for dictation tools
A voice-typing tool hears everything you say — meetings, passwords read aloud, half-formed thoughts. This is a practical checklist for evaluating any dictation tool: what happens to the audio, whether your speech trains models, where history lives, what actually leaves your Mac, and which controls you get.
Chinese dictation on a Mac: why voice typing breaks on the world's biggest language
Chinese has more first-language speakers than any other language, yet voice typing fails on it more often than on English. Tones and a huge homophone space mean Chinese dictation needs sentence-level context, not word-by-word transcription — plus the IME tax, traditional-vs-simplified output, and Chinese-English code-switching. Here's what actually makes Chinese dictation usable.
Dictating English as a non-native speaker: accuracy beats speed
Most voice typing is tuned to a narrow set of native accents and stumbles on the English the rest of the world actually speaks. Here's why accent robustness and a quiet grammar-smoothing rewrite matter more than raw speed for second-language dictation.
How accurate is AI dictation? A framework for judging it yourself
Accuracy in dictation isn't one number. Raw word accuracy, formatted-output accuracy, and whether the tool kept your meaning are three different things — and a language count tells you almost nothing about per-language quality. Here's how to test any dictation tool on your own speech in a few minutes and read the result honestly.
Japanese dictation on a Mac: kanji conversion is the real test
Turning Japanese speech into kana is the easy half. Choosing the right homophone kanji — 公開, 後悔, 航海 all sound like koukai — needs the whole sentence, and matching です/ます against plain form matters the moment you dictate an email instead of a chat. Here's what separates Japanese dictation you can send from Japanese dictation you have to rewrite.
Korean dictation: spacing and honorifics make or break it
Korean word spacing (띄어쓰기) is genuinely hard and instantly visible when it's wrong, and the same sentence changes shape depending on whether you're writing a Slack DM or an email to a director. That's why Korean dictation needs a rewrite pass over the raw transcript, not just transcription — plus the mixed English loanwords that run through every business sentence.
Dictating in two languages at once: the code-switching problem
Real Asian-workplace speech mixes languages mid-sentence — English product terms inside Chinese clauses, katakana loanwords in Japanese. Single-language dictation forces a pick and mangles the other. Here's what good mixed-language handling looks like: one clean sentence, each language written as itself.
Traditional Chinese voice typing: the simplified-output problem nobody talks about
Most speech models emit simplified Chinese, so Taiwan and Hong Kong users get text they'd never write. Real traditional support is vocabulary-level — 軟體 vs 软件, 資訊 vs 信息 — not a font setting or an afterthought conversion. Here's why it's a modeling choice made per user.