Use Canto for dictation and voice notes

Canto covers speaking-instead-of-typing in two ways. Dictation turns a short spoken clip into text inside a field (a chat question or your notes) on iOS, Android, and the web. Voice notes are ordinary recordings: talk to yourself for thirty seconds and you get a transcribed, searchable item in your library.

How does dictation work?

Wherever you'd type at Canto's AI (the ask bar on the home screen, chat on a recording, and in the notes editor), there is a microphone control for voice input (the home screen labels it Dictate):

1. Tap the microphone in the input field.
2. Speak your question or note.
3. Stop, and the clip shows "Transcribing…" for a moment before the text lands in the field.
4. Edit if needed, then send or keep writing.

Dictation is for short clips, a sentence or a few. It fills the field and is then discarded; nothing is saved to your library and no recording is created. Dictated speech is language-detected like everything else, so dictate in whatever language you speak.

How do I keep voice notes in Canto?

Record them as normal recordings. Tap the record button (or a widget, the fastest capture path), say what's on your mind, tap End or Stop. A short recording goes through the same pipeline as a meeting: transcript, auto title, and notes when there's enough content.

Voice notes shine later, not at capture time: they're in your library alongside meetings, so semantic search finds "that idea about onboarding I had in the car", and asking across recordings folds your notes-to-self into answers.

Dictation or a voice note: which one?

You want	Use
Ask the AI something by voice	Dictation in the ask bar or chat
Add a spoken line to a recording's notes	Dictation in the notes editor
Keep the audio and transcript of a thought	A regular recording
Capture a memo hands-free from the home screen	Widget → regular recording

The rule of thumb: dictation produces text in a box; a recording produces an item you can search, share, and chat about.

FAQ

Do voice notes count against my free minutes?

Yes. Voice notes are regular recordings, so their transcription counts toward the free plan's 100 min / mo monthly allowance, and dictation clips are metered the same way based on their length. At a few minutes each, that's still a lot of voice notes.

Can I dictate a whole document?

Dictation is built for short inputs. For anything past a few sentences, record it; you get a transcript you can copy out, plus the audio. See Copy content out of Canto