Dictate anywhere
Hold a key, say it, and it types where you were already typing.
There is no Earshot window to dictate into. It types into the app that already had the keyboard, which is all pasting has ever been, and it is why this works in a terminal, a mail draft and a spreadsheet without any of them knowing about it.
- 1
Put the cursor where you want the words
Any app, any text box. Earshot types into whatever had the keyboard when you pressed the key, so there is nothing to switch to and nothing to install per app.
- 2
Hold the hotkey and talk
Ctrl+Alt+Space unless you changed it. The panel appears and the words arrive while you are still speaking, because recognition streams rather than waiting for you to finish.
- 3
Let go
The text is pasted where you were pointing. Press Escape instead of letting go and the whole thing is thrown away, which costs nothing.
The panel shows what has been settled and what is still being revised. Anything dimmer than the rest is the recogniser’s current guess, and it will change as you keep talking.
Changing the key
The menu bar has it, under Shortcut. Anything that will not parse leaves you with the default rather than with no way into the app, so a bad combination is never quietly the setting.
When it goes wrong
It hears me, and nothing gets typed
Accessibility permission has been revoked, which macOS does quietly after some updates and whenever the app is replaced.
Open Setup from the menu bar. It names the missing permission and takes you to the right pane. The text is left on the clipboard when this happens, so a single paste recovers whatever you just said.
The words went into the wrong window
The app you dictated into quit or lost the front while the recogniser was finishing, which takes about a third of a second after you let go.
The menu bar keeps the last transcript. Open it and paste it again, into the right window this time.
It transcribes the room
The voice detector is set for a quiet desk.
Raise EARSHOT_VAD_THRESHOLD above 0.5. It trades a little responsiveness for a lot of quiet.
It cuts me off mid-sentence
A turn ends after a fixed run of silence, and 700 ms suits somebody who thinks before they speak rather than while they are speaking.
Raise EARSHOT_VAD_SILENCE until the pauses inside your sentences stop counting as the end of them.