Windows already has dictation. So why something else?
Fair question, and the answer starts with something nobody likes to admit: for plenty of jobs, Windows dictation is enough. It’s free, it’s already installed, and it opens with Win+H. If you dictate a couple of lines of plain English with a connection up, it does the job.
This page is about where it doesn’t reach, using facts from Microsoft’s own documentation, so you can decide whether those limits apply to you.
Five things Win+H doesn’t do
These aren’t bugs: they follow from how it’s built. None of them can be worked around with a setting.
There’s no dictionary of yours
There is no user-editable dictionary. Client names, acronyms, trade terms and brand names come out however the model guesses, every time, with no way to teach it the right spelling.
Here: the words you teach it beat everything else — even a famous brand name the model would rather write instead.
Windows picks the key
Voice typing opens with Win+H and its own little bar on screen: the shortcut is not yours to choose, and the bar stays there while you speak.
Here: you pick the key — one on the keyboard or a side button on the mouse — and you decide whether to hold it or press it once to start and once to stop.
It never says it wasn’t sure
If it mishears a name, it writes it and moves on. You find the mistake by proofreading — or you don’t, which is worse, because it leaves in an email.
Here: when a word isn’t certain it tells you (“cTrader, did you mean Citrader?”) and one click settles it.
The good rewriting needs a new PC
Auto-punctuation is on every PC, but the layer that genuinely rewrites speech into clean prose is reserved for Copilot+ machines with a dedicated neural processing unit.
Here: the cleanup — hesitations dropped, second thoughts understood — works on any Windows 10 or 11.
One language at a time
You pick a language and it stays picked. Drop three foreign technical terms into a sentence — normal if you work in tech — and they get transcribed by ear.
Here: over a hundred languages, and mixing inside one sentence comes out spelled right instead of mangled.
The Win+H limits above are taken from Microsoft’s support page on voice typing and are accurate as of 27 July 2026. Microsoft updates Windows often: if something here is no longer true, tell us and we’ll fix it.
When Windows is the right choice
It wouldn’t help us to pretend otherwise: there are plenty of people for whom paying for this makes no sense.
Win+H is enough
If you dictate rarely, and almost always in one language.
If your writing has no proper nouns, acronyms or technical terms that must be spelled a particular way.
If you’re always connected and your voice passing through a cloud service doesn’t bother you.
If you have a Copilot+ PC, where speech rewriting is already included.
You need more
If you write client, library or product names every day and they have to be right first time.
If you’ve had a corrector “fix” a name that was already correct.
If the audio of what you say must not leave your computer.
If two languages get mixed inside your sentences.
A corrector may change how a word is spelled.
Not which word you said.
It’s the rule that separates us from any generic dictation.
The fastest way to decide is to try it
Seven days with everything switched on. If after a week Win+H still feels like enough, you have your answer and you haven’t paid a thing.
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