Dictation has a rhythm to it, and nothing breaks that rhythm faster than a mistake. You are three sentences into a thought, you phrase something badly, and suddenly you are reaching for the mouse, clicking into the text, selecting the offending line and deleting it. By the time you look up, the thought has gone.
This is the small friction that stops a lot of people getting properly fluent with voice typing. So there is a better answer: just say what you want undone.
The short version: say scratch that, undo, delete that, or delete that last sentence and PeekoType removes the sentence you just dictated. Say delete that last paragraph and it removes the paragraph. It happens where your cursor is, in whatever application you were typing into, without touching the keyboard.
The commands
| Say this, on its own | What happens |
|---|---|
| scratch that | Removes the last sentence |
| undo, or undo that | Removes the last sentence |
| delete that, or delete this | Removes the last sentence |
| delete that last sentence | Removes the last sentence |
| delete that last paragraph | Removes the last paragraph |
| undo last paragraph | Removes the last paragraph |
Several phrasings do the same job on purpose. People do not reach for the same words under pressure, and a command you have to remember precisely is a command you will not use.
How it knows what to delete
This is the part that makes the feature trustworthy, and it is worth a minute of your time.
PeekoType is not reading the screen. It cannot see inside your Word document or your browser, and no general cross-application interface would let it do so reliably. What it does have is a much simpler and more dependable piece of knowledge: it typed the text itself, so it knows exactly what it sent and where.
When you say scratch that, it looks at its own record of what it recently typed into that particular window, finds the sentence boundary, and sends precisely that many backspaces. It is mechanical rather than clever, and mechanical is exactly what you want when something is deleting your work.
The limits, stated plainly
Because that record is the foundation, the limits follow directly from it, and they are deliberate.
It is session only. Nothing is written to disk. Close the app and the memory of what it typed goes with it. There is no file anywhere recording your keystrokes, which is very much the point.
It is per window. Switch from Word to your browser and the tracked history is discarded rather than carried across. If you edited the text by hand in between, or scrolled somewhere else, or closed the document, there is no safe way to know what is now where. Guessing would be worse than doing nothing.
It is bounded. A single command can only reach back so far. You cannot say scratch that four times and lose an afternoon's work.
It deletes, it does not rewrite. "Make this shorter" or "say that more formally" would need a model that generates new wording, which is a fundamentally different kind of AI from speech recognition. PeekoType does not pretend to offer it. What it does, it does predictably.
Why it never fires by accident
Edit commands only trigger when the phrase is the entire utterance. Not embedded in a sentence. The whole thing, spoken alone.
So if you dictate "I think we should undo the changes from last week", that sentence is typed exactly as spoken. Nothing is deleted. The word undo only becomes a command when you say it by itself and stop.
This matters more than it might seem. Anybody who writes about software, law, editing or project work uses words like undo, delete and scratch in ordinary sentences all the time. A feature that occasionally ate a paragraph because you happened to use a word would not be a feature, it would be a hazard. The same safety rule governs the simpler punctuation and deletion voice commands.
Where this genuinely helps
Two groups of people notice the difference immediately.
The first is anyone dictating because typing hurts. If you are managing RSI or wrist pain, the whole value of voice typing is not touching the keyboard. An editing model that requires you to reach for the mouse every time you misspeak undermines the point. Voice editing closes that gap.
The second is anyone who thinks out loud. Writers, consultants, therapists writing up notes, founders drafting at midnight. Speech is naturally exploratory. You start a sentence, hear that it is wrong, and want to try again immediately. Being able to say scratch that and carry on keeps you inside the thought instead of stepping outside it to operate the software. Our guide for writers goes further into building that habit.
A small habit worth forming
Use it early and often. The instinct most people have to unlearn is pausing, tutting, and reaching for the mouse. Try saying scratch that instead, even when the mouse would be quicker, for the first few days. Once it is automatic you stop losing your thread, and that turns out to be worth considerably more than the seconds saved.
Everything here runs on your own computer, like the rest of PeekoType. Nothing about what you typed, deleted or rephrased leaves the machine, which we explain properly in how offline speech recognition works.