Recently, Notion has added some very nice features. One of them is AI, of course. Another tool that recently showed up, was dictation, which I’ve missed for quite a while. How do you use dictation inside Notion?
Sometimes it’s easier to talk and say things than to type them, and it goes faster to say something and then come back and add or change things in text.
So, I decided to try this feature.
Using Dictation in Notion – Getting Started
I made a post earlier on how to use dictation in Word to write a blog post. But since I use Notion most of the time when I’m planning and writing my text, I think it’s a nice feature they’ve added. I noticed something quite early on, and I’m not sure if it’s my mic or if I’m just talking fast.
When you dictate, you get an icon on your page. You also see three dots, you know, the ones where something is loading. And if you talk too fast, you’ll also notice that some parts are missing.
If I deliberately talk slowly and watch my speech appear on the screen, then Notion picks up what I say very well. But if I talk at a normal pace and forget to make pauses, then I get three dots at the end of the sentence and it just misses parts of what I said.
So, if you plan to use this feature, you should probably talk slowly.
You can’t use all of your talking speed. You can also watch on the page to see how much Notion picked up from what you said. It also seems to have some bugs. One is that if you stop talking, or pause the recording, and then pick it back up, it doesn’t continue.
The icon shows up on the page, but even when you talk, you can’t hear it. I don’t get any text, so the input is just missing. I’m not sure why, but I think it might be a bug. Hopefully, this will be solved in a later version.
Dictation in Notion vs Word
One thing similar to when you use dictation in Word is that it will type what it thinks you said. So some things might be incorrect and you’ll still have to review your text manually. If you articulate slowly, it works better, of course.
Another thing that I haven’t tried out is what languages the notion is. I’m not sure if Notion supports Swedish, which is my mother tongue. English is supported. But I think there should be an article on this on Notion’s web page stating which languages are supported.
Sometimes when you speak, you can see that the icon moves to the front of where the sentence starts. Sometimes it doesn’t pick up what you’ve said, other times it corrects what it thinks I said.
I think you can make it work better if you activate the microphone using the pop-up window at the bottom if you have multiple languages on your iPad. I just made a change and changed the microphone input or I pressed the button at the bottom of my screen. And now it seems to pick things up a lot better when I chose English as they put language so I should probably add a screenshot of this to show what I mean.
Also when I changed the input language, I didn’t get as much space in Notion between the lines. It doesn’t give me an extra blank row in between the sentences. However, when using only Notion it punctuates better. Right now it doesn’t seem to know when one sentence is over and when the next one begins. Commas are used correctly but full stops aren’t used.
OK, I think I figured it out. It’s like it’s the same as in Word if you say the word “full stop”, you get a full stop to end your sentences. Rookie mistake on my part then.
Not sure if you can use voice commands to make it create a bulleted list and other things but, again, this can probably be found online.
Final Thoughts
All in all, it’s a nice feature to see the notion even though it may bug sometimes not sure if it’s the program or my iPad bugging but if you haven’t tried it yourself, you should try it out and see if you like it or not. As far as features go, like I said, I’ve missed this and it’s a nice thing they’ve added.