Dictation turns talat into a system-wide voice-to-text tool, on the same on-device speech engine as your meetings. Press a hotkey, speak, and the text is on your clipboard, or dropped straight into whatever app you’re typing in. Nothing is uploaded. Because dictation and meeting recording share your microphone, you can’t do both at once.
Starting a dictation
Set a hotkey under Settings → Dictation, then either tap it to toggle (press once to start, again to stop) or hold it to talk (release to stop). Press Esc while dictating to throw the current one away. You can also start from the Dictation view in the app.
The dictation panel
A small panel appears at the bottom of the screen and shows the words as you speak, without stealing focus from the app you’re working in. It makes each stage clear: listening, typing, tidying up, and a confirmation once the text is on your clipboard. A low-latency draft keeps pace as you talk, and each time you pause, the just-spoken stretch is re-done with a higher-quality pass and swapped in.
Cleanup
Optionally run the finished text through one of your configured models to fix punctuation and strip filler words, without rewriting what you actually said. It’s off by default, and you can give it your own instructions. If cleanup fails or is taking too long, talat falls back to the raw text.
Text replacements
Map a spoken phrase to a snippet of text, so saying “my email” types your address, or a trigger expands into a signature. Matching is forgiving about case and punctuation, and replacements are applied last, after any cleanup, so nothing mangles the snippet.
Auto-paste
With auto-paste on, talat drops the text straight into the app you were using rather than just copying it. It captures the target app the instant you stop and checks again before pasting, so the text can’t land in the wrong window. On macOS this needs Accessibility permission, which the Dictation settings will prompt for. It’s off by default.
Per-app overrides
You can tune cleanup and auto-paste per application, so you might skip cleanup in a chat app but keep it for email. Anything you don’t set for an app falls back to your global settings.
History
Every dictation is saved locally, with both the raw and the cleaned-up text, and is full-text searchable alongside your meetings. From the Dictation view you can re-copy an entry, delete one, or clear the lot.