Dictate into another app

Set the hotkey

No dictation hotkey ships preset. In Settings, under Dictation, set one. It’s global: it works while any app has focus, with embral’s window hidden.

Dictate

1. Put your cursor where the text should go, in any app.
2. Press the hotkey. An overlay at the bottom of the screen shows your words as you speak.
3. Stop either way: tap the hotkey again, or, if you held it down while talking, release it.

When you stop, embral cleans up the text, then pastes it at your cursor and copies it to the clipboard. Both delivery switches, Auto-paste on completion and Copy to clipboard, are on by default and live in the same settings section.

On macOS, auto-paste needs the Accessibility permission. The settings row shows a prompt until it’s granted.

What cleanup does

The AI cleanup fixes punctuation, removes filler words and false starts, and applies spoken commands like “new line” or “period.” If your dictation opens with an instruction, it follows it: saying “make a bulleted list: milk, eggs, flour” pastes a list, not a sentence. Cleanup runs on the built-in model, or in the cloud when you’re signed in. Set it under Clean up with AI, or turn it off. If cleanup fails, you get the raw transcription. It never loses your words.

History

The Dictation page keeps both the raw and the cleaned text of every dictation, along with the app it went to. History is searchable from the command palette (Ctrl+K). Auto-delete is off until you turn it on.