Find files by voice with Smart Find
Say "Find Mrs Becker's report" and the matching files show in the Action Bar. How to choose the folders, and how the index stays on your computer.
- Applies to
- Windows, macOS
- Version
- Dictate 0.4.0-beta.6
Transcript
Hold Ctrl+Win and say, for example, "Find Mrs Becker's report" or "Where is the Siemens contract?". The matching files show in the Action Bar. A click opens a file.
Smart Find works only when the Assistant switch under Settings›Dictation is on. When it is off, the Smart Find page shows Voice search works in assistant mode. and the Turn on assistant mode button.
Choose the folders
Smart Find searches only the folders you choose.
- Open Smart Find in the sidebar.
- Click Add folder and choose the folder with your documents.
- Wait until the folder is read. The row shows Reading … with the progress, then Up to date.
After that Dictate keeps the folders up to date by itself. It reads new and changed files. Remove folder takes a folder out again.
The results in the Action Bar
The Action Bar shows up to five files in one row: icon, name, folder and date.
| You do | What happens |
|---|---|
| Click a file | The file opens |
| Right-click a file | The file's folder opens |
| Mouse over a file | The full path shows above the bar |
| Arrow keys and Enter | Choose a file and open it |
| Esc, a click elsewhere or 20 seconds without use | The row closes |
If you say "Open the offer for Becker", Dictate opens the best file at once when it is clearly ahead. The bar then shows Document opened. When several files match about equally, the bar shows them to choose from. If Dictate finds nothing, the bar shows No matching document.
Narrow the search
Words in your request help to sort the results. They never hide a file.
- File type: "the PDF", "the spreadsheet", "the presentation"
- Time: "from yesterday", "last week", "from last month", "in March", "2025"
- "the latest"
Smart Find also finds a file with a typo, a missing umlaut, or by part of a German compound word, for example "Brief" in "Arztbrief". English document words find German ones: "contract" finds "Vertrag".
What Smart Find reads
Of PDF, Word (DOCX), OpenDocument (ODT), PowerPoint (PPTX), RTF, HTML, Markdown and text files, Smart Find reads the content too. It finds every other file by its name and folder, spreadsheets too.
Under File types you switch types off, for example Images or Audio and video. Dictate does not read the types you switch off.
The Smart Find page
- Try a search: enter a request as you would say it. The page shows the results and how long the search took.
- Index: the number of files, the files with text, the size of the files, the size of the index on this computer and the last update.
- Pause reading: Dictate reads new and changed files only after the pause. Search still works.
- Rebuild: Dictate empties the index and reads all folders again. Until it is done, search finds only part of your files.
Use documents when writing
With Use for texts under When writing, the assistant puts matching passages from your files into a draft when it writes an e-mail or a letter. This works only with MediSync Local. MediSync Cloud gets no text from your documents.
Where the data stays
The index, the search and the results stay on this computer, also with MediSync Cloud. With MediSync Cloud only your spoken request goes to speech recognition, like every dictation. Settings›Privacy›Delete local data deletes the index too. Privacy in Dictate has more.
Did this article help you?