I’ve heard from a number of sources that there isn’t any good documentation about the ‘inline’ dictation commands.  These commands can be uttered in the middle of a dictation stream (in other words, you don’t have to stop speaking to use these commands), and are used to guide the Speech Recognition Engine to produce the desired results.

Command Description
tab Inserts a <tab> character.
new-line Inserts a new line character and forces the next word to be capitalized.
new-paragraph Inserts two new line characters and forces the next word to be capitalized.
caps <word> Capitalizes the first letter of <word>.
no caps <word> Lowercases <word>.
all caps <word> Uppercases <word>.
no space Does not insert a space before the next word.
literal <argument> Does not perform any inverse text normalization on <argument>.
numeral <argument> Forces <argument> into numeric form, if possible.

Simple Examples

Tab, new-line, new-paragraph, caps, no caps, and all caps are pretty straightforward:

User Input Recognition Result
king tab county king<tab>county
this is a test new-line this is another test This is a test
This is another test
this is a test new-paragraph this is another test This is a test

This is another test
no caps C I A cia
C I A CIA
I have caps in my closet I have In my closet
I have all caps nothing I have NOTHING
I have no space available I haveavailable

Examples using <literal>

In order to understand what <literal> does, you need to know what Inverse Text Normalization does.  Inverse Text Normalization is the process of converting spoken forms into a preferred textual representation.   Some examples are:

User Input Recognition Result
doctor smith Dr. Smith
period .
united states of america United States of America
three hundred and five 305

The <literal> command prevents that conversion from occurring, and forces the text to be input exactly as spoken.

Examples using <numeral>

The best way to describe the <numeral> command is to give some examples:

User Input Recognition Result
numeral two 2
two two
numeral twelve 12
twelve 12
numeral four eight seven six two three 487623
four eight seven six two three four eight seven six two three
numeral one and a half million 1,500,000
numeral one point five million 1.5 million
numeral one point four five 1.45

If the phrase cannot be interpreted as a number, then the numeral command does nothing:

User Input recognition result
numeral I want to go to the store I want to go to the store

Note that this phrase has a possible number (to –> two –> 2), but the intervening words deactivate the command.