Browse the docs

Dictation: hold to talk

Hold a key, speak, let go, and clean text lands where you were typing. On-device speech, an optional cleanup, a style per app.

Hold Fn Space and talk. A small pill at the bottom of the screen shows you are being heard, with the last few words. Let go: it says "Typing…", and your words appear in the field you were in, already punctuated, with the "um"s and false starts gone.

This is the shipped macro Hold to talk in the Examples group. Settings › Dictation edits it for you, and the macro itself is ordinary: one Dictate step, so you can see exactly what happens and build on it.

What it does #

  1. Listens while the key is down. Recognition runs on this Mac and streams as you speak, so at key-up only the last words are left to finish. Nothing is stored; the audio is dropped when it is done (unless you turn on Keep the last 20 recordings).

  2. Cleans up the text on this Mac with Apple Intelligence: fillers and false starts out, punctuation and capitals fixed, your words kept. It never adds words. If it takes longer than a second and a half, or Apple Intelligence is off, you get the words as recognised.

  3. Types it by pasting into the app that was in front when you started. If you switched apps while talking, or a password field has secure input on, nothing is typed: the text is copied and the pill says so.

A tap shorter than a quarter second does nothing, so a mistaken press types nothing. Esc while holding cancels.

Different styles in different apps #

Settings › Dictation lists apps with a style. Out of the box: Slack and Messages are "casual, short, no sign-off", Mail is "complete sentences", Xcode and Visual Studio Code are "as a code comment in the file's language". Each row becomes an If block in the macro, so open Hold to talk in the editor to see them.

Words #

Names and product terms go in Settings › Dictation › Words. The recogniser favours them and the cleanup spells them as written.

Voice for any macro #

Because Dictate is a step, voice can feed anything: dictate, then make a to-do from {{dictation.text}}; dictate a commit message; dictate a note to a file. See Dictate.

If it does not work #

  • Nothing happens when you hold the key. The first time, macOS asks to allow the microphone for Switchboard Engine. Settings › Permissions shows its state. See Troubleshooting permissions.

  • It types the words with the "um"s still in. Cleanup is skipped when Apple Intelligence is off or busy, when the text is long, or when the cleanup took more than 1.5 seconds. Open the run in Activity: the Dictate row says which.

  • Fn opens the emoji picker or system dictation. In System Settings › Keyboard, set "Press 🌐 key to" to "Do Nothing".