Settings
What you can configure per device, and why most of it travels with the device while a couple stay on this Mac.
Every device you own has its own settings. Open a device in the companion and go to Settings — brightness, sleep, volume, the microphone, storage and alerts are all there. Changes apply live; there is nothing to save and nothing to restart.
The one thing worth understanding is where each setting actually lives.
Two kinds of setting
Most settings are stored on the device itself. Connect that device to a different Mac and its brightness, its name, its sleep timing are already what you set — because they never lived on the Mac in the first place. They travel with the device.
A couple of settings are stored on this Mac. They tune how this Mac cleans up and splits the microphone audio, so they only make sense here and stay here.
| Where it lives | What it covers | If you move the device |
|---|---|---|
| On the device | Name, display, sleep, volume, mic level, storage, alerts | Comes with it |
| On this Mac | Voice processing, phrase detection | Stays here |
What lives on the device
Name and display
Device name is what shows when pairing, and Brightness runs 20–100%. Sleep and wake live in their own Power section: two timers — Sleep on battery and Sleep when plugged in — plus Tap to wake and Dim when docked, so a device on a nightstand dock behaves differently from one in your pocket.
Audio
Volume and Chime volume set how loud the device's speaker and its system sounds are. Mic level sets how loud captured audio comes out. Pre-roll captures a moment of audio before you press, so the first word is not clipped.
Storage and alerts
App storage chooses where recordings and app data are written — onboard flash, an SD card, or automatic. Low battery alert sets the level that raises the warning on the device.
Some controls only appear if the hardware is there
A few settings depend on what the device can do. Speaker (playing this Mac's audio through the device) and the advanced Mic max boost show up only on a device with that hardware. If you do not see a control, this device does not have the part it drives.
The microphone, and where levelling happens
Auto level (AGC) is the setting that decides how the microphone is levelled. It is off by default — raw capture, with loudness set by Mic level. When you turn it on, you choose where the work happens: on the device, on the companion (this Mac), or automatic (the device if it can, otherwise this Mac). There is only ever one leveller in the chain, never both.
That choice is what makes the two host-only settings matter.
What Voice processing and Voice sessions actually do
Voice processing is this Mac's microphone cleanup — a noise gate and auto-gain. It runs only when Auto level (AGC) resolves to the companion (you picked Companion, or picked Auto on a device that cannot level on its own). Set the microphone to level on the device and these controls sit idle.
Voice sessions decides how a stretch of speech is cut into phrases for transcription — how long a pause ends a phrase, and how long one phrase can run. Both live on this Mac because both are about how this Mac hands audio to a speech provider.
From the terminal
The zeph command shares the companion's core, so it reads and writes the same settings — handy for scripting a device into a known state. See The CLI.