Dictation inserting unwanted puncutation

With macOS27 Golden Gate, Apple has quietly redesigned the core speech-to-text architecture to support their updated Apple Intelligence infrastructure. The native dictation and Apple SpeechAnalyzer components run locally on Apple Silicon (M3 or newer Macs with at least 12GB of memory), handling real-time automatic capitalization, punctuation, and formatting directly on the Neural Engine. Your M5 Pro MBP hardware supports that local model.

With the local models, Apple has removed the manual "Auto-Punctuation" toggle from the Dictation settings in certain regions and for newer hardware. The new "Advanced Dictation" model uses conversational AI context to determine sentence structure, treating any brief pause as a hard stop (a period/full stop) with no built-in way to turn it off.

Here are some possible workarounds:

Keep Talking

The new model dynamically evaluates text in real-time. If you pause briefly and it inserts a period, continuing your sentence without manually deleting the period will sometimes cause the AI to realize the sentence is ongoing, forcing it to automatically erase the period and change it back to a space. It is jarring to watch, but fighting it by stopping to manually backspace often interrupts this predictive correction.

Check the Text Input Settings

While it isn't a direct dictation toggle, some users have found that the OS treats dictation pauses as double-space triggers. Ensure this secondary shortcut isn't compounding the issue:

• Open System Settings > Keyboard
• Next to Input Sources, click Edit
• Turn off "Add period with a double space"

Consider a 3rd Party Alternative

If native dictation continues to waste your time there are 3rd party tools (e.g., MacWhisper) that may serve your needs better.

Either way, you should let Apple know about this problem. “We” are users like you and have no power to implement any suggestions. Apple employees are generally precluded from even reading these forums, with the exception of moderators who only monitor for compliance with the T&C.

To have Apple consider your feedback, submit it here:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

It is absolutely terrible on my iPhone 18 Pro as well. Keeps inserting periods everywhere when I pause, even if it doesn’t make any sense in the sentence. I used to just say “period” out with the setting turned off, but now that they’ve removed it, I have to go and edit them out of all my messages. It’s pretty ridiculous, and the “workarounds” suggested above are NOT acceptable

First, like the username. I learned about Lewis dot structures as an undergrad in Lewis Hall, named for Gilbert Lewis who introduced them.

lewisdot wrote:

It is absolutely terrible on my iPhone 18 Pro as well. Keeps inserting periods everywhere when I pause, even if it doesn’t make any sense in the sentence.

I’m sure I’d be annoyed by that. I don’t use dictation on my Macs, but I do on my iPhone. I’d bet it’s even worse in CarPlay where you don’t see what goes out. Not an issue for me at this point, my iPhone 14 Pro is not (Apple) Intelligent enough to have the issue.

I used to just say “period”

Ok, that made me laugh. When my kids were little, they thought my iPhone was called “Comma” for that exact reason.

Seriously, though, all you can really do is give feedback to Apple.