Dictation
Hold Super+Alt and talk. A small pill above the taskbar moves with your voice, what you say appears in the text field as you speak, and it’s typed in when you let go. The pill spins while the last few words are recognized. Press Esc while holding the keys to stop without typing anything.
A quick press of Super+Alt starts listening without holding. It stops when you press them again or Esc, or by itself a few seconds after you stop talking. Settings → Input → Dictation changes the shortcut or turns it off.
On computers with a Copilot key, holding it works the same way. A quick press opens Start instead, and Settings → Input → Copilot key changes that to an app of your choice or to nothing, or turns holding it for dictation off. Keyboards with an assistant key of their own work the same way.
Turning it on
Section titled “Turning it on”Dictation is off until you turn it on in Settings → Input → Dictation. Turning it on downloads the speech model for your language, about 700 MB, and shows how far along it is. Holding the shortcut before then offers to set it up. If you pick a language that needs the other model while it’s on, that one downloads instead, and the first download stops where it was, ready to carry on if you switch back.
The language follows the keyboard layout you’re typing with, and otherwise the language your computer is set to. You can pick a language instead. Languages written in more than one script, like Latin and Cyrillic, come out in the script your layout uses.
| Recognizer | Languages | Download |
|---|---|---|
| Parakeet | Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian | 698 MB |
| Whisper | About 75 more, including Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese. It runs on the graphics card and needs a processor from about 2013 or newer | 574 MB |
Automatic picks Parakeet for the languages it knows and Whisper for the rest, and you can choose one yourself. The Dictation page lists the models on the computer and how much space each takes, and Remove deletes one. Turning dictation off keeps them until you remove them.
Privacy
Section titled “Privacy”Speech is recognized on your computer. The microphone is only open while you’re dictating, the pill above the taskbar shows whenever it listens, and nothing you say is saved or sent anywhere. The privacy indicator in the taskbar stays for other apps using the microphone, including while you dictate. The model is downloaded once from Luft’s servers and checked before it’s used.
Apps without text input support
Section titled “Apps without text input support”Most apps show the words as you speak. In apps that can’t, such as older X11 apps, they show in the pill above the taskbar, and they’re pasted when you let go. Your clipboard is put back right after.
Memory
Section titled “Memory”The model loads when you start dictating, which takes a second or two the first time, and stays ready for three minutes after you last used it. Parakeet uses about 900 MB of memory while loaded and Whisper uses the graphics card’s memory.