# Talking instead of typing

> Dictate into quick capture, talk to the assistant, turn a voice memo on a card into a note, and what a minute of cloud voice costs on each plan.

Anywhere The Margin has a mic button, you can say it instead of typing it.
Your words land in the field as text you can still edit, so nothing is saved
until you have seen it.

## Tap or hold

The mic in quick capture (`⌘ ⇧ K`, or the feather on a phone) works
two ways.

- **Tap**: starts dictation. Speak, then tap the mic again to finish.
- **Hold**: is hold to talk. Speak while you hold it and let go when you are done.

While you speak, the words your device hears appear as you go. When you
finish, the recording is cleaned up in one pass: fillers and false starts come
out, and "no wait" or "scratch that" do what they say. If there is already
text in the field, you can talk to it: "change Sara to Sarah" edits the draft
rather than adding to it.

## Checking what it heard

After each clip a small review sits under the field.

- **Undo** puts the field back exactly as it was.
- **Cleaned** and **What I said** switch between the tidied text and your
  words as spoken.
- Words it was unsure of are marked. Tap one to see what else it might have
  been, hear that stretch of the recording, or type the right spelling.
- Tick **Always spell it this way** and the word joins your dictionary.

Your dictionary lives in **Settings → Voice**. It follows
your account to every device, and the newest entries go with each recording
as spelling hints, which is how names stop coming back wrong.

## Talking to the assistant

The assistant's message box has the same mic, on the web and on the phone.

- **Tap** it to dictate a message, read it, and send it yourself.
- **Hold** it to talk. When you let go and the words come back, they are sent
  after a three-second countdown that shows what is about to go. Undo in that
  time keeps the words in the box so you can edit them.

There are no command shortcuts here, because the assistant is the one who
acts on what you say. "Add milk to the list" is simply a message to it.

## A voice memo on a card

An audio file attached to a card has a **Transcribe to a note** button in the
card's attachments. It uses the same engine as dictation, saves the cleaned
text as a note in your Inbox linked to the card, and counts against the same
minutes.

## What it costs

**Cloud voice minutes a month**

- **60** on Free
- **500** on Pro
- **1,200** on Family, pooled across the household
- **500** per seat on Team
- **120** while a trial runs, unless your paid plan already gives more

Minutes are their own allowance, so talking does not eat into the
assistant's actions. Past them, cloud voice uses one AI action for every two
minutes. When both are gone, the mic falls back to your device's own
recognition, which is free and never counted. What you have left is shown in
**Settings → Voice**.

> **Note: Keeping it on your device** Turn on **Keep dictation on the device** in
> **Settings → Voice** and nothing is sent for cleanup. It is
> free, but you get exactly what was heard, fillers included, and some browsers
> cannot do it at all.

Recordings are not kept once your words are saved. Cleanup needs a
connection; typing, and your device's own dictation where it has one, do not.

**Where to next**

- [Notes](https://themarginapp.com/docs/notes): where captures land and how the Inbox works
- [Margin Intelligence](https://themarginapp.com/docs/margin-ai): the assistant you are talking to
- [Plans and limits](https://themarginapp.com/docs/plans-and-limits): every allowance, plan by plan


---

Section: Doing the work. Checked against the running product on 29 September 2026.
Web page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/voice. Every docs page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/llms.txt