Use your Mac's built-in mic over AirPods
AirPods switch to a low-quality call profile when used as an input, which hurts recognition and adds a second or two of Bluetooth activation lag. Your Mac's built-in mic array is usually the better dictation input, even when AirPods are your default output.
Teach it your vocabulary
The single highest-leverage thing you can do. Add product names, colleagues' names, and jargon to Settings → Custom Dictionary. Terms you add are used to bias recognition and to spell things your way afterward — in dictation, meeting transcripts, and enhanced notes alike.
Better still: just fix a word right after dictating it. With Learn corrections automatically on, Amlin adds it to your dictionary on the spot (with an Undo). Otherwise it lands in the Suggested terms review queue.
Speak in normal sentences
You don't need to speak punctuation, and you don't need to speak slowly. Amlin is tuned for natural speech, including the false starts and mid-sentence corrections that make ordinary talking sound messy.
Choose the right cleanup level
Text keeps coming out more polished than you intended? Drop to Light, or Verbatim for exact fidelity.
Long rambly dictations coming out as walls of text? Try Standard, which repairs sentence boundaries and adds paragraph breaks.
Quiet the room where you can
Recognition quality falls off in loud environments and with very quiet speech. Getting closer to the mic helps more than speaking louder.
Check the first word
If your first syllable is occasionally clipped, raise Keep microphone engine warm in Dictation Settings → Transcription.