Cleanup
Your iPhone tidies what you said before it’s sent: the ums, the repeats, the “no, wait”. It edits your words and never answers them, so a prompt reaches Claude as a prompt.
The five levels#
The Cleanup menu in the Send to panel, beside Send after pasting: Off · Light · Medium · Heavy · Custom, each with a line saying what it does. Your pick applies to the next dictation. The same choice is in Settings › Cleanup.
You say: so um I think we should, uh, move the standup to, no wait, to Thursday at ten because like half the team is out Wednesday and and the demo isn't ready anyway
| Level | What it does | What arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Off | Exactly what the recognizer heard. | so um I think we should uh move the standup to no wait to Thursday at ten because like half the team is out Wednesday and and the demo isn’t ready anyway |
| Light | Removes filler and repeats, fixes punctuation. | I think we should move the standup to, no wait, to Thursday at ten, because half the team is out Wednesday and the demo isn’t ready anyway. |
| Medium | Also fixes grammar and false starts. The default. | I think we should move the standup to Thursday at ten, because half the team is out Wednesday and the demo isn’t ready anyway. |
| Heavy | Rewrites rambling speech into tidy text. | Let’s move the standup to Thursday at 10. Half the team is out Wednesday, and the demo isn’t ready yet. |
| Custom | Your own instructions. | Whatever your instructions ask for, such as numbers as digits or one short paragraph. |
Whatever the level, a request stays a request: say “write a function that sorts a list” and that sentence is what arrives, not a function.
Custom#
Custom is your own instructions for Apple's on-device model. It starts as exactly Medium's instructions, so picking it changes nothing until you edit them.
- To edit: choose Edit Custom Instructions… under Custom in the Cleanup menu, or go to Settings › Cleanup › Custom instructions.
- Your text is saved as you type. Reset to Default puts Medium's instructions back; an empty box follows the default too.
- Good uses: “write numbers as digits”, “keep it to one paragraph”, “use British spelling”, “format a list I dictate as bullet points”.
- It still never answers your words, whatever the instructions say, and your dictionary still applies.
The dictionary#
Up to 50 names, tools and acronyms (kubectl, Postgres, TPA, your colleagues' names), in Settings › Cleanup › Dictionary. The recognizer listens for them, and cleanup keeps them exactly as you wrote them instead of “correcting” them away.
On your iPhone only#
Speech is recognized on the iPhone, and cleanup runs on Apple's on-device model. Neither sends your words anywhere. That means cleanup needs:
- An iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence: iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 or later.
- iOS 26 or later, with Apple Intelligence turned on.
- English as the dictation language.
Otherwise the steps are greyed out, a tap says why, and you get the raw transcript, which is often all you need. Long dictations are cleaned in pieces against a time limit; if time runs out, the rest arrives as spoken and the item is marked Partly cleaned.
Raw is one tap away#
Both versions are kept. On the iPhone, the last dictation and each history item have a Cleaned / Raw switch, and touching and holding Copy offers the raw words. On the Mac, each history row has Copy and Copy Raw. Scripts get both, too: text, raw, cleaned and cleanup_level in the local API.