Dictation in any app
TL;DR
| What changed | What it means |
|---|---|
| Dictation (Pro) | Hold ⌥⇧Space, speak, release, and the text lands at your cursor in the front app. |
| Meeting detection (Pro) | Turn on Offer to record meetings and a prompt appears when a call uses your microphone. |
| Re-summarize | Run a finished recording’s summary again with your own instructions, on Markdown notes only. |
| Start recording hotkey | Everyone can set a combo on the Quick Notes tab that starts and stops a meeting. |
The next obvious step for Oris after meeting transcription and quick notes is dictation. Oris could already take your meeting notes and now it can dictate into any app for you too.
Hold Option Shift Space , speak, release. The transcription lands wherever your cursor is in the app in front of you (a Slack message, a code comment, an email draft, iMessage, etc). The audio, as always, stays on your Mac.
One spine, three destinations
The architecture is unchanged and so the app footprint remains small. A meeting recording comes in, gets transcribed and summarized, and lands a structured note in your vault or Apple Notes. A quick note comes in, gets transcribed, and lands in your in-app inbox or a pinned note. A dictation comes in, gets transcribed, and lands at the cursor of your front app. Same recorder, same on-device path, different destination.
Instant start
If dictation is enabled, no audio is recorded and no microphone indicator appears until you press the hotkey.
The first dictation of a session will prepare the speech model and subsequent dictations land sooner because the engine remains in memory until idle for five minutes.
Getting text into an app
The three insertion methods are Paste, Accessibility, and Type it out. Paste is the recommended default, and your setting chooses which method Oris tries first. Oris dictation comes with auto fallback.
Accessibility specifically has one useful difference: Oris can read the target field back after writing. If the app ignored the write (common in some Electron apps), Oris sees that the text is absent and falls through to the next method.
Paste and typing remains local and private as Oris gets no receipt from macOS. A Command V or a key event is sent, and that’s all Oris knows. They fall through only when sending itself fails, not when the app ignores them silently.
Password fields and secure keyboard input are excluded from pasting by design. In those cases, the transcription is saved to your quick notes with a message with the failure condition instead of being inserted.
The menu bar
The Oris menu bar helper already turned red during a meeting recording. In 0.10 it also turns purple while a dictation is capturing, and blue while a quick note is. The top line of the menu shows the current state in text, “Dictating…” or “Quick note · 00:04”. The mark never changes width.
Also in 0.10
Three other things shipped alongside dictation.
Meeting detection also shipped in 0.10, and it’s live: turn on Offer to record meetings under General → Meetings (part of Oris Pro) and Oris asks whether to start recording when a call is using your microphone. You can still start a meeting recording yourself anytime with Start or a recording hotkey.
A Start recording hotkey is available to everyone. Assign a combo on the Quick Notes tab and it starts a meeting recording exactly as the menu bar does, stopping it on the next press.
Re-summarize runs the model again on a finished recording with free-text instructions you write covering focus, format, or level of detail. It is offered when the completed recording still has its audio and transcript and landed in a Markdown note that Oris can patch. The summary is replaced in place and the transcript is untouched. It is not offered for Apple Notes destinations.
Getting dictation
Dictation is part of Oris Pro, which is free in beta. Sign up with just an email — no card or payment required. Once Pro is on, turn on Enable quick notes under the Quick Notes tab, then open the Dictation tab and turn on Enable dictation, granting Accessibility when System Settings prompts you.
The dictation handbook covers the rest. The full 0.10 changelog lists everything else in the release.
If you haven’t tried Oris, start at orisnotes.com/get-oris.