Groupthink
How it worksAgentsFeatures
Meeting intelligencePre-meeting overviewsCapture optionsCalendar syncAvailability and booking linksIntegrations
NewsPricingDownloadDocsSign inGet Groupthink

Voice Dictation

Hold the fn key (the Globe key on newer Mac keyboards), say what you want to write, and let go. Groupthink types the words wherever your cursor is, in whatever app you have in front of you. Everything you dictate is also saved to your Captures history in Groupthink, and when Groupthink can tell who it is about, it becomes part of your relationship with that person.

It works anywhere on your Mac: mid-email, in a terminal, in a Slack reply, in someone else's app. You do not have to switch to Groupthink first, and you do not have to switch back after.

Voice Dictation is part of the Groupthink desktop app for Mac. The Captures it saves show up everywhere you use Groupthink, including the web app, but the fn key only works where the desktop app is running.

Setting it up

The first time takes a few minutes, because macOS needs to be told that Groupthink may notice the fn key and may paste text for you. Groupthink walks you through it in the desktop app, and each permission is asked for at the moment it is needed. Here is the whole path from a fresh install.

  1. Install the Groupthink desktop app on your Mac and sign in.
  2. Open Today in the desktop app. A card near the top says Hold fn and speak, try it. If a permission is still needed, the card says so and has a Set up in Settings button. Click it. (If you already have everything granted, the card only says Got it. Skip to Your first dictation.)
  3. You land in Settings > Capture, on the card called Voice Dictation on this Mac. Near the top of it is a notice titled One-time permission: Input Monitoring. Read it, then click Continue. macOS shows its own prompt. Choose Allow.
  4. The notice goes away on its own and the card shows fn key: active. No restart needed. You are set up.

If macOS did not show a prompt at step 3, it was told no once before, and it never asks twice. Click Open System Settings on the same notice, or open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Input Monitoring yourself, and turn on Groupthink. If Groupthink is not in the list, click + and pick it from your Applications folder. The card switches to fn key: active within a few seconds of the permission being granted.

What each permission is for

macOS asks for up to four permissions, and one of them sounds worse than it is.

Microphone. Needed to hear you. The first time you hold fn, macOS asks whether Groupthink can use the microphone. Choose Allow. If you turned it down earlier, the pill tells you microphone access is off; turn it on under System Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone.

Input Monitoring. This is the permission that lets Groupthink notice you pressing and releasing the fn key while you are in another app. macOS shows this prompt with no explanation from Groupthink, and the name sounds broader than what it is used for, so here is exactly what it covers.

  • What Groupthink watches: one key. It sees the fn key go down and come back up. That is the whole signal.
  • What Groupthink does not do: read what you type. The listener receives only modifier-key changes (keys like fn, Shift and Command going up or down) and acts only on fn. The letters, numbers and words you type never reach it. Nothing you type is read, stored, or sent anywhere.
  • Why the permission is this broad: macOS has no narrower permission for watching a single key. Noticing fn anywhere on your Mac requires Input Monitoring, so that is what Groupthink has to ask for. It does not change what fn does for macOS either; the key keeps its normal job.

Accessibility and Automation. These two let Groupthink paste at your cursor. Groupthink types by asking macOS to press ⌘V in whatever app is in front, and on macOS an app pressing keys for you is its own category of trust.

  • Automation (System Events): on your first dictation, macOS asks whether Groupthink may control System Events. Choose Allow. To fix it later, open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Automation, find Groupthink, and switch on System Events.
  • Accessibility: macOS requires this before an app can press keys for you, and it does not always prompt on its own. If the pill says it is missing, open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and switch on Groupthink.

You do not have to get these two right up front, and nothing is lost while they are missing. Dictation still works; the pill reads Copied, press ⌘V to paste, names the missing permission, and the words are on your clipboard and saved to Captures.

Your first dictation

  1. Put your cursor where you want the text: a message, a doc, a terminal, a form field.
  2. Hold fn. A small pill appears at the bottom of your screen and says Listening. Your words show up in the pill as you speak.
  3. Keep holding while you talk.
  4. Let go. The pill says Inserted at your cursor (or Pasted into the app you were in) and the text appears where your cursor was. A moment later it adds where the words were saved: Filed under [Name] when Groupthink could tell who it was about, or Saved to Groupthink, but not sure who it's for when it could not.

A few details worth knowing:

  • A quick tap does nothing. Groupthink starts listening only after you have held fn for a moment, and a hold that ends almost immediately is thrown away. Brushing the key by accident does not start a dictation.
  • Escape cancels. Press Escape while you are holding fn and nothing is typed or saved. The pill says Cancelled.
  • One dictation lasts up to 60 seconds. If you are still holding the key at 60 seconds, Groupthink stops listening and uses what it heard so far, so the microphone is never left open.
  • Your clipboard comes back. Groupthink pastes by putting the words on your clipboard for a moment. Whatever was on your clipboard before is put back about a second after the paste.
  • Long dictations are typed in full and saved up to 4,000 characters. Everything you said is typed at your cursor. The copy saved to Captures is trimmed to 4,000 characters, and the pill tells you when that happened.

Your Captures history

Every dictation is saved to Captures. In the left sidebar, it is the first item under Now and then. On the desktop, the menu bar icon also has a Captures… item that goes straight there. The page works the same in the desktop app and on the web at app.groupthink.com/capture/history.

The page is titled Captures. A row of source chips sits above the list: Yours, Spoken, Typed, Texts, Email, Files and All. Yours is the one you land on, and it holds everything you captured yourself, newest first. Spoken narrows it to dictations. All widens it to everything that reached Groupthink, including forwarded email and files.

Each entry shows:

  • The full text, with a copy button on the right. This is the point of the page: the words you dictated, ready to be used again somewhere else. Something spoken into a terminal on Tuesday can be pulled back out on Friday.
  • When you captured it.
  • Who it was about. A chip with the person's name links to their page. When Groupthink made a guess it is not sure of, the chip adds unconfirmed after the name, and the pill will have asked you to confirm at the time. When it could not tell at all, the entry says Not routed to a contact and offers an Attach to contact button, which opens a picker so you can file it yourself. The dictation is kept in every case.
  • Which app you pasted into, when Groupthink recorded it. Older dictations, and anything typed on the web, say App not recorded.

Before your first dictation the page reads Nothing captured yet, with the line Hold fn and speak, your snippets will appear here. underneath.

Settings

Everything about Voice Dictation lives on one card: Settings > Capture, the card called Voice Dictation on this Mac. All of it belongs to the Mac you set it on rather than to your account, because it describes what that keyboard and that microphone do.

The status row says fn key: active when everything is working, and fn key: not active with a short reason when it is not. This is the place to answer "is this even on?"

Capture gesture is how you start a dictation. It reads Hold fn and speak. by default, with a Change button beside it. Inside, the two choices are:

  • Hold the fn key. Speak while you hold it, and let go when you are done. This is what the rest of this page describes.
  • Use a keyboard shortcut. Press once to start and again to stop. This one is a toggle rather than a hold, because macOS gives an app no key-up event for a global shortcut. Use it if another app already owns your fn key. Click the shortcut field, press the combination you want, and Save. Reset to default puts fn back.

A computer with no fn key skips the choice and uses the shortcut.

Microphone is which input a dictation opens. It reads Auto-detect (from system settings) until you pick one, and Change opens the list, with the suggested device marked (recommended). Opening the list also opens the selected microphone and shows a level bar that moves while you talk, which is the quickest way to tell a wrong microphone from a dead one. The bar stops when you close the list.

Type at my cursor is on by default. On means what this page describes. Off means dictations skip the typing step and are only saved to Captures, which also means the Accessibility and Automation permissions above are never needed.

On the web, the same card appears with a note that these settings live in the desktop app.

When the words are copied instead of typed

Sometimes Groupthink puts the words on your clipboard instead of typing them. The pill says Copied, press ⌘V to paste. This is by design, and it happens when:

  • You are in a password or other secure field. macOS blocks apps from typing into secure fields, so Groupthink leaves the words on the clipboard and the pill says a secure field has the keyboard.
  • A permission is missing. The pill names which one and where to turn it on.
  • The paste did not go through for some other reason.

In each case, press ⌘V to paste, or copy the text later from Captures. If nothing on screen can accept text when you let go, nothing appears, but the words are still saved to Captures.

If you already use another dictation app

Wispr Flow and other push-to-talk apps default to the same held key. Two different things can happen, and Groupthink tells you which one you have.

Your words arrive twice

The common case. Both apps hear the key, both transcribe, and both paste, so you get your sentence twice.

Settings > Capture shows a notice titled Two apps may be listening for fn, naming the other app. The fix is to give one of the two a different key. Use a keyboard shortcut instead, on that notice, takes you straight to the Capture gesture setting so you can move the Groupthink side and leave the other app alone.

Nothing happens at all

Less common. Some apps take the key at a level where Groupthink never sees the press, so every permission can be granted correctly and nothing arrives.

Settings > Capture shows a warning titled The fn key may be taken, naming the app it suspects when it has reason to. Quit that app, change its shortcut, or change the Groupthink gesture. Then hold fn once; the warning clears by itself the first time a press gets through.

This warning waits until there is reason to believe a press went missing, so a freshly opened app does not accuse an app you are not dictating with. When nothing running looks like a dictation app, no app is named at all, because plenty of ordinary keyboard utilities look the same from the outside.

If there is no notice and still nothing happens, check the two usual causes: Input Monitoring is not granted (the card would say so), or you are tapping the key rather than holding it.

Windows and the web

Voice Dictation is a Mac feature today. On Windows there is no fn gesture, and Groupthink does not type at your cursor; the settings card says so. The Captures page is available everywhere you use Groupthink, so anything you dictate on a Mac is there on your other devices too.

Troubleshooting

The pill says Copied instead of typing. See When the words are copied instead of typed.

The pill says Nothing to save. Groupthink did not hear any words. Check that your Mac is using the microphone you expect, then try again.

The pill says Not saved. Groupthink could not save the dictation, and the pill says why: you are signed out, there is no connection, or you dictated too many times in one minute. If the text was already typed at your cursor, it is safe there. If it was not, the words are put on your clipboard so you can paste them.

The pill says Cancelled. You pressed Escape, or the hold was too short to count.

It filed my dictation under the wrong person. Open the person's page from the chip on the Captures row and delete the note there, then dictate it again. When Groupthink was unsure, the pill says so at the time and asks you to confirm rather than claiming a match.

My clipboard had something on it. Did dictation overwrite it? Normally no. Typing at your cursor briefly uses the clipboard and then puts your previous clipboard back, about a second later. The one exception: when the text could not be typed and the pill says to press ⌘V, your words stay on the clipboard on purpose, since the clipboard is the only place you can reach them from.

Can Groupthink see what I type? No. The Input Monitoring permission lets Groupthink notice one key, fn, going down and up. It does not subscribe to keystrokes, and nothing you type is read, stored, or sent anywhere. What each permission is for explains why macOS has no narrower permission to ask for.

What exactly is saved? The words. While you hold the key your speech is transcribed as you speak, and that transcript is what gets typed at your cursor and saved to Captures. Captures are private to you, like notes.

Getting Help

Questions about Voice Dictation, or a dictation that did not land where you expected? Email support@groupthink.com.