In an automatic speech recognition (ASR) dictation application, a user interface may be provided for informing a user how to dictate desired text. Input may be received from the user of the dictation application, specifying a desired text sequence. In response to the received input, output may automatically be provided to the user via the user interface, indicating one or more speech sequences that, when spoken by a user and recognized by the dictation application using ASR, would cause the dictation application to output the desired text sequence as a recognition result.