Dictation

Typing is the slowest part of a lot of your day: the Slack reply, the follow-up email, the note you meant to write after the call. Dictation lets you say it instead, in whatever app you are in, and puts the words at your cursor.

It runs on your Mac. What you say is transcribed on-device and the audio is deleted as soon as it has been.

Dictate into any app#

Put your cursor where the text should go: a message box, an email, a document, a form field. Then:

1. Press Ctrl Shift D and speak.
2. Press Enter. Your words appear at the cursor.

Press Esc instead to throw away what you said.

A small pill at the top of the screen follows along: Listening while it hears you (the mic lights up when you speak), Transcribing while it turns your words into text, and a short message if something went wrong.

Speak the way you normally would. Punctuation and capital letters are added for you, so there is no need to say "comma". Take your time, too: nothing is sent until you press Enter, so you can pause and think mid-sentence.

Transform what you said#

Sometimes what you said is not quite what you want to send. Press Tab instead of Enter, and your words open in the Command Panel:

• Pick an action, such as Make it an email, Translate to English or Proofread, and the result is pasted where your cursor was.
• Or pick Insert as I said it, at the top of the list, to paste your words unchanged after all.
• Esc closes the panel without pasting anything.

The actions are the ones you turned on for the Command Panel in Settings, Chat Actions, and they run on the engine the Command Panel row uses in AI engines: your local model for private text, or a cloud or ACP engine when you want a stronger one. When the Command Panel has no engine set up, the pill does not offer Tab, and Enter still inserts your words as spoken.

A few ways people use it:

• Say a quick, rough reply, press Tab, and pick Proofread before it lands in Slack.
• Think out loud in French, press Tab, and pick Translate to English for an English-speaking customer.
• Talk through what happened in a meeting, press Tab, and pick Make it an email for the follow-up.

Things that work the way you would hope#

• Enter and Tab do not reach your app while Azynote listens. In Slack or Teams, Enter would normally send the message. While you dictate it belongs to Azynote, so nothing is sent early and no stray tab lands in your text.
• Your clipboard is left alone. Whatever you had copied, text, a screenshot or files from Finder, is still there afterwards.
• The text goes where you started. If you click into another window while speaking, the words still land in the one you were in when you pressed Ctrl Shift D.
• Any language you speak. The language is recognised each time, so you can dictate in English one moment and in French the next.
• Your names, spelled right. People, projects and terms from your workspace profile are passed to the transcription, so a customer name that used to come back as two ordinary words is written the way your workspace writes it. To teach it a name, tell the chat: "remember the product is called Northwind."

If something goes wrong#

• Nothing is typed. Azynote needs Accessibility access to type into other apps. Check System Settings, Privacy & Security, Accessibility, and make sure Azynote is on.
• The pill says "Didn't catch anything". It heard silence. Check that the right microphone is selected in Settings, Audio.
• The pill says dictation is paused. Dictation shares the on-device transcription with meetings, so it waits while a meeting or a file is being transcribed. It also waits while you are in a voice conversation.
• Enter does not insert. Press Ctrl Shift D a second time instead. It always inserts.

Something else? Write to support@azynote.com.