Your first dictation
Put your cursor anywhere, press the hotkey and speak. Cleaned-up text lands where you were typing.
Three steps
- Put your cursor where you want the text: an email, a chat box, your editor.
- Press
⌘⇧Space(the default hotkey). The recorder pill appears and starts listening. - Speak, then click ✓ or press the hotkey again. Your text lands at the cursor.
The pill has three parts: ✕ cancels (Esc works too), the bars in the middle show your live audio and ✓ stops and processes. A spinner shows while it works, then the text appears.
When a persona other than your default, or a translation, is shaping the result, the pill shows a small label naming it.
What “cleaned up” means
Cluinn removes filler words and false starts and adds punctuation, so what lands is text you can send rather than a raw transcript. That clean-up comes from your persona: new accounts start with General, which keeps your own words and tidies them. There’s nothing to set up, but you do need to be signed in.
Cluinn writes in the language you speak, or you can pin one. See Languages & translation.
Choose what happens after
Open the account chip at the bottom of the sidebar, choose Settings, then open the Dictation tab. After transcription, in the Output group, decides where the text goes: Paste at cursor (the default), Copy to clipboard, Paste & copy or Do nothing.
What each option does, and the rest of that tab: Dictation settings.
If nothing pastes
Pasting needs the macOS Accessibility permission (see Permissions). The text is on your clipboard anyway, so ⌘V puts it where it belongs while you sort that out. If the permission is missing, Settings → Dictation shows a Permission row with an Enable Permission button that opens the right pane.
Tip: The hotkey doesn’t have to be ⌘⇧Space. Change it in Settings → General, or use a mouse button instead. See Hotkeys.
Once the basics click, Dictating & paste options covers everything else the recorder can do.