How to Add Punctuation to Voice Typing (Indian Languages)

· punctuation, danda, dictation tips, Indian languages

The single biggest complaint about Indian-language dictation is a wall of text with no full stops. Punctuation in Devanagari, Bengali or Tamil dictation behaves differently from English, and knowing the three approaches saves a lot of manual editing.

Approach 1 — speak the punctuation

Most engines understand spoken punctuation in English even when the surrounding text is not English:

  • "comma" → ,
  • "full stop" or "period" → .
  • "question mark" → ?
  • "new line" → line break
  • "new paragraph" → blank line

This is reliable but breaks your speaking rhythm, which is the main reason dictation is fast in the first place.

Approach 2 — pause instead

A clear pause of roughly half a second at the end of a sentence gives the model a strong signal for a sentence boundary. Long pauses mid-sentence do the opposite and cause spurious breaks. Speak in complete thoughts, pause, then continue.

Approach 3 — clean it up afterwards

The most practical method: dictate the whole thing with no punctuation at all, then run one cleanup pass that inserts sentence boundaries, commas and paragraph breaks. In Baani AI that is the AI Cleanup button, and it also removes filler words such as *matlab*, *yaani* and *umm*.

The danda rule

Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Nepali and Sanskrit use the danda (।) rather than a full stop for sentence endings. Many transcription models output a Latin period instead. If you are writing something formal — a school assignment, an official letter, a published article — check that sentence endings use ।, and that the double danda (॥) appears only in verse.

Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujarati use the Latin full stop in modern prose, so no substitution is needed there.

Quotation marks and numbers

  • Indian-language quotations conventionally use "double quotes" in print; single quotes are for nested quotes
  • Dictated numbers usually come back as digits, which is right for amounts and dates and wrong for formal prose — say "in words" and fix afterwards
  • Currency: say "rupees five hundred" rather than "₹500" for a cleaner result

Practical workflow

Speak freely, ignore punctuation entirely, then clean up in one tap and read once before sending. That produces better text than trying to punctuate live, and takes less time.

Try it on your language: Hindi, Bengali, Assamese or Gujarati.

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