MimicScribe

Dictation

How do I dictate text into an app?

There are two ways to use Insert Mode:

  • Hold (push-to-talk): Hold the Insert Mode hotkey (default: Left Option), speak, then release. Your speech is transcribed and pasted at the cursor position.
  • Tap-to-toggle: Tap the hotkey once to start recording, speak, then tap again to stop.

Works in any text field — editors, browsers, email clients, chat apps.

Can I use a mouse button instead of a keyboard shortcut?

Yes. Settings > Voice Typing > Dictation has a Mouse Button picker on the Insert Mode row, alongside the keyboard shortcut. Options include Mouse4, Mouse5, and others. Transform has the same picker on its own pane, Settings > Voice Typing > Transform.

Does it press Enter after I dictate?

Not unless you ask it to. Submit on Hold Release is off by default, so your text is inserted and nothing is submitted. Turn it on in Settings > Voice Typing > Dictation if you want hold-to-talk dictation to press Enter for you when you release the key.

Can I use different settings for different apps?

Yes. Settings > Voice Typing > Dictation > App Profiles lets you create per-app overrides. Each profile can:

  • Match specific apps — pick one you’re running, or Browse… for one that isn’t open
  • Match sites by address (e.g. “twitter.com”), from the preset list or one you add
  • Override the AI provider (Gemini, Apple On-Device, a custom endpoint, or None) and the refinement prompt

One profile is already there: Chat & Social, matching Messages, Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, and the common social apps and sites. Edit that one rather than making a second profile for the same apps — the first matching profile wins, so a duplicate further down the list never runs.

Dictation stays deliberately lean: a profile sees only your prompt and your vocabulary list — not your context notes or reference documents (those are used by Transform and meetings). Put anything a profile needs to know, like a signature or a tone rule, directly in its prompt.

Can I change how the AI refines my dictation?

Settings > Voice Typing > Dictation > Advanced > Dictation Prompt — edit the system prompt that controls how raw transcription is refined. Each app profile can also override this prompt with one of its own.

Can I dictate without AI correction?

Set the provider to None in a dictation profile. The on-device transcription is inserted with basic cleanup — filler words removed, stutters collapsed, a paragraph break after a long pause, spelled-out acronyms joined back up (“D V D” → “DVD”) — but no AI refinement. This works offline and doesn’t use free tier credits.

Spoken quantities stay in the words you spoke them in: you get “twenty twenty five”, not “2025”. The step that turned them into figures was removed in rc.29 because when it guessed wrong — “twenty ten milliseconds” as “2010 ms” — the words behind the figure were gone for good. Reading a whole sentence well enough to format its numbers is a job for a language model, so the AI providers still do it; the raw path doesn’t guess.

You can also choose Apple (On-Device) to use Apple’s on-device language model for refinement, if your Mac supports Apple Intelligence.

Where do my past dictations go?

They’re kept, and you can go back to them. Settings > Transcription History opens a window listing every Insert and Transform result, searchable, with copy and delete. It’s also reachable from the menu bar panel’s transcriptions button.

This is the place to look when you dictated something into the wrong window, or want the text of a transform you ran last week.

Can I paste my last result again?

Turn on Double-Tap to Repaste in Settings > Voice Typing > Dictation — it’s off by default, so that an accidental double-tap never drops old text at your cursor. With it on, tap the hotkey to start and stop again within 2 seconds without speaking, and your last result is pasted at the cursor. It works for both Dictation and Transform, each re-pasting its own last result.