Tone matchingregister
Tone matching is a formatting feature that writes the same dictated words differently depending on where they are going: lowercase and loose in a chat app, punctuated and complete in an email, untouched in a terminal. The linguistic term for the level of formality is register.
You do not write the way you speak, and you do not write the same way everywhere. "shipping this today will ping you when it’s live" is right in Slack and wrong in a client email, and the words you said were the same both times. A dictation tool that produces one house style for every destination is right in one app and slightly off in all the others.
Tone matching reads the app you are dictating into and applies a style rule for it. The rule can be inferred from the app’s category, chat versus mail versus notes versus code, and it should be something you can pin per app when the default is wrong for you.
What changes between registers
Casual: sentence case optional, fragments allowed, contractions kept, an emoji if you said one. Professional: full sentences, proper capitalization, contractions expanded where they read as slack, a greeting and sign-off preserved if you dictated them. Neutral: clean and complete without the polish. Verbatim: nothing changes. What never changes, in any register, is your content: the words you said are the words that land, arranged for the room.
Context, read locally
The app is the first signal. The second is the text already on screen: a reply to a thread should pick up the names in it and match its level of formality. Reading that field is a real privacy question, and the difference between tools is stark. Some send a screenshot to a server. A careful tool reads the focused field on the machine, keeps it in memory for one dictation, and stores nothing.
When to pin a rule
When the category guess is wrong for you. A founder who writes to investors in Messages wants professional there; a developer who dictates commit messages in a terminal may want neutral rather than verbatim for that one field. The rule should be one setting per app, visible, and reversible, and the defaults should be good enough that most people never open it.
In Flit
Flit matches tone to the app, casual in Messages, professional in Mail, verbatim in Terminal, lets you set the rule per app, and reads context locally and in memory only.
One sentence, three apps →Questions
Fair questions.
What does per-app tone mean in a dictation app?
The tool writes the same words differently depending on the app you are in: casual in a chat app, professional in email, verbatim in a terminal. You can usually override the rule per app.
Does tone matching change what I said?
It changes the form, not the content: capitalization, punctuation, contractions, sentence completeness. Your words should survive in every register, and a tool that keeps a content check on its output guarantees that.
How does the tool know which app I am in?
From the frontmost application, which macOS reports through the accessibility layer. Some tools also read the focused text field for the names and formality of the thread; ask whether that reading happens locally or on a server.
Where this shows up on flit.fyi
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