Dictate at your cursor
Hold the button, speak, release. The text lands wherever you were typing.
Hold the main button on your device, speak, let go. The words arrive as text in whatever app your cursor is already in — an editor, a chat box, a terminal, a browser field. Nothing to focus, nothing to paste.
It is the last page of Get started because it is the first thing worth doing.
The path one sentence takes
Hold, speak, release
The hold is the turn. Press and release are the utterance boundaries, so a pause in the middle of a sentence keeps the turn open — the 300 ms silence gap that segments hands-free listening does not get to close a turn you are still holding down.
What it needs
A speech provider
Transcription is somebody's model, running on your Mac or in the cloud. Pick one and the dictation graph has something to transcribe with.
Choose a speech provider covers both kinds, and which providers can actually transcribe — a shorter list than the providers you can configure.
macOS Accessibility
Typing into another app is a synthesized keystroke, and macOS gates that behind Accessibility. First run asks for it once.
Typing at the cursor is a macOS capability today.
Release: look, then land
For the cursor destination, the transcript stops for a look before it lands. After speaking ships set to Review first: the text parks, the companion raises it for review, the tray says a review is waiting, and your device shows it too. Confirm, and it goes in.
Set After speaking to Send immediately and the text lands the moment you let go of the button. A parked review you neither confirm nor cancel expires on its own after 30 seconds, so a review can never wedge the pipeline.
What "lands at the cursor" actually means
The companion writes the transcript to the clipboard, synthesizes Cmd+V into the frontmost app, and puts your previous clipboard contents back 150 ms later — long enough for that app to service the paste.
Two things follow from it being a paste. The text arrives in one piece rather than character by character, and it works in any app that accepts a paste, which is what "wherever your cursor is" is built out of.
Without Accessibility
The transcript is never dropped
If Accessibility has not been granted, the cursor destination degrades instead of failing. The transcript goes to your clipboard, and the companion tells you exactly what is missing:
Typing needs the Accessibility permission — copied to the clipboard instead
The message comes with the button that grants the permission. Grant it, hold the button again, and the same sentence types itself.
The same fallback catches a paste that fails for any other reason: the transcript stays on the clipboard, and the companion says so.
Where the binding comes from
First run puts dictation on Main · hold for you: you chose the cursor path, you configured a speech provider, and the hold is where that goes.
You can bind the hold yourself, or rebind it to something else, whenever you like.