If you’ve tried dictation on a Mac you’ve hit this within a minute: you speak a sentence, you get the words, and there’s no full stop. To get one you say “full stop”. To get a new line you say “new line”. After two paragraphs of that, most people give up.
Why it works that way
Apple’s dictation is a transcriber. It writes down the sounds it hears and it doesn’t guess at structure, because guessing wrong in a legal document is worse than guessing nothing. So punctuation is explicit. It’s a defensible choice for accuracy and a bad one for everyday writing.
The commands, if you’re staying
Say these and macOS inserts them: “full stop” or “period”, “comma”, “question mark”, “exclamation mark”, “new line”, “new paragraph”, “open quote” and “close quote”, “hyphen”, “colon”. Capitalisation is automatic after a full stop. It works, it’s just slow, and it makes you sound like you’re reading a telegram.
The alternative
Modern dictation apps run your speech through a language model after transcription, and the model adds punctuation the way a person would. Speaky Box does this on the Dictate key: you talk normally, pause where you’d pause, and the full stops, commas and paragraph breaks appear where they belong. It also removes the ums and false starts while it’s there.
The full comparison against Mac dictation covers the rest of the differences. The short version: if you dictate more than a sentence a day, stop saying “comma”.