Guides›1Getting started›Your first dictation
Beginner3 min read

Your first dictation

Press Alt+Space, say a sentence, press it again. What the overlay is telling you, and what to do when nothing appears.

Dictation is a toggle, not a walkie-talkie. Press the hotkey once to start listening and again to stop — there is no hold-to-talk mode.

The default hotkey

ActionWindows / LinuxmacOS
Start / stop dictationAlt+Space⌥Space
Alternate binding for the same thingCtrl+Shift+Space⌃⇧Space
Command modeAlt+Shift+C⌥⇧C
Toggle AI refinementAlt+Shift+R⌥⇧R
Toggle hands-free / wake wordAlt+Shift+H⌥⇧H
ⓘ
Both activation bindings do exactly the same thing. The second exists because Alt+Space is taken by the window menu in some applications.

Try it

  1. 01
    Put your cursor in a text field
    Anything that accepts typing — a browser address bar, a chat box, your editor.
  2. 02
    Press Alt+Space
    The listening overlay appears with a live waveform. Speak normally; there is no need to slow down or over-enunciate.
  3. 03
    Press Alt+Space again
    The overlay switches to processing, then the finished text is typed into the field you started in.
✺
Press Esc at any point to cancel. During listening it throws the recording away; during typing it stops the text mid-insert.

Reading the overlay

The overlay is more than a progress spinner. While it is up you can:

  • Watch the live transcript build up as you speak
  • Change the spoken language with the up and down arrow keys
  • Override which workspace is applied, instead of letting InkSpoke choose
  • Press Send — identical to pressing the hotkey again — or the ✕ to cancel
  • See which microphone is actually being used, along the bottom

If the target field cannot accept injected text, the overlay stays open and offers a Copy button instead of silently losing your words.

The first run is slower

If you are set to an on-device model, the first local dictation may pause while the speech model downloads. The default is Whisper Small, about 466 MB, and it is fetched on demand rather than during installation.

When nothing happens

SymptomMost likely cause
Hotkey does nothing at allAnother app owns the shortcut, or on macOS the Accessibility permission is not granted. Try the Ctrl+Shift+Space binding to tell the two apart.
Overlay appears, waveform stays flatThe wrong input device is selected, or microphone permission is denied. The device name is shown at the bottom of the overlay.
Text appears somewhere elseFocus moved while you were speaking. InkSpoke types into whatever is focused when it finishes, not when it started.
Nothing is typed into an admin window (Windows)Windows blocks it. Use Restart as administrator from the tray menu.

Recording stops on its own after 30 seconds of silence, and caps at five minutes in a single take.