Dictating & paste options
Start, stop or cancel dictation from anywhere, read the recorder pill and choose what happens to the finished text.
Transcribe is Cluinn’s dictation: it turns what you say into text at your cursor.
Start dictating
- Put your cursor where the text should go, in any app or website.
- Press
⌘⇧Space(the default dictation hotkey) and speak. - Press the hotkey again, or click ✓ on the pill.
Cluinn transcribes your speech and types it where your cursor is. The hotkey is a toggle: press once to start, again to stop. You can change it in Settings → General → Transcribe hotkey, and it can be a mouse button. See Hotkeys.
There’s nothing to set up for transcription. Leave the language on auto-detect or pin one in Languages & translation.
Stop, cancel or abort
| While | Do this | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Recording | ⌘⇧Space or click ✓ | Stops and processes the recording |
| Recording | Esc or click ✕ | Cancels; the recording is discarded |
| Processing | Esc or click ✕ | Stops the processing |
The recorder pill
The pill moves through five states: idle, a short warm-up spinner while the mic opens, recording (the live bars show the mic hears you), a processing spinner, then a quick fade. The warm-up is skipped when the mic is already open; see Keep mic warm below.
When more than plain dictation is going on, the pill says so with a small label: the name of a persona other than your default, the language Smart translation is writing in, or both, with a small padlock if you’ve locked the language (see Languages & translation). The default persona’s name is never shown, so a new account’s pill carries no label until you turn on a translation or switch to another persona. A persona set to one fixed language doesn’t show it, because you chose it already.
The pill appears at the spot you pick in Settings → General → Appearance → Recorder position: top or bottom, and left, centre or right. You can also drag it somewhere else; picking a position again moves it back.
When the pill tells you something
Three short notices can appear on the pill:
| Notice | What happened |
|---|---|
| Nothing heard | You stopped without saying anything. The recording is dropped: nothing saved, nothing typed. |
| Nothing pasted · copied to clipboard | There was no text field to paste into. Your words are already on the clipboard, ready for ⌘V. |
| Microphone not detected | The mic sent no audio at all (flat AirPods, a sleeping headset, a muted input). The pill widens to show your current input; click it to pick another and the dictation restarts. Plug the mic back in while the notice is up and Cluinn says Microphone found and carries on. |
After transcription
Settings → Dictation → After transcription decides what Cluinn does with the result:
- Paste at cursor types the text where your cursor is (the default).
- Copy to clipboard puts it on the clipboard instead.
- Paste & copy does both.
- Do nothing keeps it only on your Dictations page.
More in Dictation settings.
Sound and mic options
These are in Settings → Dictation too:
- Microphone: which input to record from. System default follows your Mac, and switches to AirPods or a headset when you connect them, with no restart.
- Microphone level: boosts the input while recording, without changing your Mac’s own mic level.
- Keep mic warm: holds the mic open for 15 minutes after each recording, so the next one starts at once, without the warm-up spinner.
- Start & stop sound, with a Beep sound picker and Volume, so you know the mic state without looking at the pill.
More in Dictation settings.
How much you can dictate
Dictation comes with a monthly pool of hours and a ceiling on any single day, both set far above everyday use. One dictation also has a maximum length: if you keep talking past it, everything up to that point is transcribed and saved, and you can start another. The figures are in the fair-use section of our Terms, and Usage explains when Cluinn mentions them.