How to dictate your first sentence

Dictate a sentence

1. 1
   Click into any text field — a Slack message, an email, a document.Walkie types where your cursor already is, so the cursor has to be somewhere.
2. 2
   Hold your dictation shortcut and keep holding it.A small overlay appears showing a live waveform, so you can see that Walkie is hearing you.
3. 3
   Speak normally, at your normal pace.Do not slow down or over-enunciate — the speech models are trained on natural speech and accuracy drops when you speak unnaturally.
4. 4
   Release the key.The overlay shows that it is transcribing, then your text is typed into the field.

Push-to-talk or hands-free

Holding the key is push-to-talk, and it is the default because it makes the start and end of your speech unambiguous. Walkie also supports a toggle mode, where you tap once to start and tap again to stop — useful for long dictation where holding a key is uncomfortable.

Both are configured in Settings → Transcription.

What Walkie does to your words

In Cloud Mode, the raw transcript is not what gets typed. Walkie cleans it up first.

It strips filler words, fixes grammar, capitalises properly, and formats the result for the app you are dictating into — a terminal gets different treatment from an email. See App-aware formatting.

If nothing appears

The most common first-run problem is a missing permission rather than a transcription failure. Walkie heard you correctly and had nowhere to put the text.

• On macOS, check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility and confirm Walkie is switched on.
• Confirm your cursor is actually in an editable field.
• Check the Transcribe section in Walkie — if your words are listed there, transcription worked and only the typing step failed.

Full checklist: Dictation is not typing anything.