How do I use Smart Formatting & Backtrack

Dictate numbered lists, insert exact punctuation, or fix mistakes mid-sentence. Smart Formatting structures your text automatically, and Backtrack lets you correct yourself without stopping.

How to enable Smart Formatting

How to use Smart Formatting

Context-aware formatting

Flow adjusts capitalization based on where your cursor sits — lowercase mid-sentence, capitalized after sentence-ending punctuation. It also adds spaces before and after your dictation as needed.

In messaging apps, Flow removes trailing periods for a more casual feel. Detected apps include iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Signal, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger, Beeper, WeChat, Google Messages, Texts, Viber, Instagram, X, Facebook, Reddit, and Google Voice, plus their web versions.

Only trailing periods are removed — exclamation marks and question marks are always preserved. Removal applies when:

• The current line has no existing period, exclamation mark, or question mark.

• No text is selected.

• The dictation is within the length limit for your Writing Style (see below).

Behavior by Writing Style:

• No Writing Style set (default in detected messaging apps): trailing periods are removed for dictations of two sentences or fewer.

• Casual: trailing-period removal applies in any app, up to 10 sentences.

• Very Casual: trailing-period removal applies in any app, with no sentence limit.

• Formal: trailing periods are always kept, even in messaging apps.

Multilingual formatting

Smart Formatting supports an expanded set of languages, including Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Russian, in addition to previously supported languages. All non-English languages are processed through a single generic AI formatting prompt, so there is no language-specific quality tier.

Creating lists

Use numbers or sequence words ("one… two…" or "first… second…") to create a list automatically.

Inserting punctuation

Flow handles most punctuation automatically. Say a punctuation mark by name when you need exact control. Common spoken commands include:

• Period: "period" or "full stop"

• Comma, question mark, exclamation point

• Colon and semicolon

• Dash, em dash: "em-dash", "em dash", or "emdash"

• Quotation mark: say "quotation mark" instead of "end quote" for best results

• Apostrophe: "apostrophe" or "single quote"

• Asterisk: "asterisk" or "star"

• Ampersand: "ampersand"

• Percent sign: "percent sign", "per cent", or "percentage symbol"

• Ellipsis: "ellipsis"

• Slash: "slash", "forward slash", "per", or "divided by"

• Backslash: "backslash"

• Underscore: "underscore"

• Hashtag: "hashtag" or "hash"

• Tilde: "tilde"

• At symbol: "at", "at sign", or "at symbol"

• Angle brackets: "angle bracket", "greater-than sign", or "less-than sign"

• Parentheses: "open parenthesis", "close parenthesis", "open paren", "close paren", or "brackets"

• Plus sign: "plus" or "plus sign"

• Minus sign: "minus" or "negative"

• Equals sign: "equals" or "equals sign"

• Trademark: "trademark" or "tm"

• Registered trademark: "registered trademark"

• Copyright: "copyright" or "copyright symbol"

• Degree symbol: "degree sign" or "degree symbol"

• Degrees Celsius: "degrees celsius" or "degrees centigrade"

• Degrees Fahrenheit: "degrees fahrenheit" or "degrees f"

• New line: "new line", "next line", or "line break"

• New paragraph: "new paragraph"

Flow's formatting model tolerates common variations in how these commands are transcribed, so exact phrasing isn't critical.

Press Enter (desktop only)

Say "press enter" at the end of your dictation to simulate pressing the Enter key after your text is pasted. The phrase is only detected at the end of a dictation — saying it mid-sentence leaves it intact in your text.

Trailing punctuation is handled intelligently: both "Hello world press enter." and "Hello world. Press enter." produce Hello world. followed by Enter. If "press enter" is the entire utterance, no text is pasted but Enter is still pressed.

The first time Flow detects "press enter," it removes the phrase from your text but does not press Enter. About 250 ms later, an in-app notification appears asking if you'd like to enable the feature, with two buttons: Great to enable Press Enter, or Disable to opt out. Once enabled, future uses work as expected. Enabling Press Enter from Settings also suppresses this first-use prompt.

Adding line breaks and paragraphs

Say "new line" to insert a line break, or "new paragraph" to start a new paragraph. This works best at natural pauses or between sentences.

How to use Backtrack

Backtrack is part of the Smart Formatting pipeline. It removes disfluencies, false starts, and self-corrections. Words like "actually" or "scratch that" signal a correction, and Flow uses your full dictation as context to decide what to change.

For Flow to detect a likely correction, Backtrack requires both a trigger word ("actually" or "scratch that") and a meaningful word-count reduction of more than 3 words. You can also restate naturally without using a trigger word, and Flow will infer the correction from context.

Examples

FAQs

Limitations and notes

• Smart Formatting is enabled by default on all platforms.

• On desktop, Smart Formatting is controlled by the Cleanup Level picker on the Auto Cleanup (Beta) tab.

• On Android, Smart Formatting cannot be turned off.

• "Press enter" is a desktop-only command and is suppressed in Command Mode.

• Trailing-period removal depends on your Writing Style and dictation length. Only periods are removed; exclamation marks and question marks are preserved.

• Multilingual formatting — including Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Russian — is supported. All non-English languages share a single generic AI formatting prompt, with no language-specific quality tier.

Still stuck?

Reach out to support if:

• Smart Formatting is not applying punctuation, lists, or capitalization after you've confirmed it's enabled.

• Backtrack is removing words you wanted to keep, or ignoring clear corrections.

• A punctuation command listed above isn't being recognized.

Include your platform, app version, and an example of what you said versus what Flow wrote. Most formatting issues are resolved in one reply.