Dictation

Overview

Dictation lets you turn speech into clean text anywhere on your computer. Hold a chord, talk, release — Sonna transcribes what you said with Whisper, optionally cleans it up with a local LLM, and pastes the result into the text field you had focused when you started.

Everything happens on your hardware. No cloud, no accounts, no audio leaving the machine.

The flow

Either way, every capture also appears in the Captures tab with the original audio and the transcript paired together. See Captures for what you can do with them after the fact.

Push-to-talk and toggle modes

Sonna ships two chord behaviors out of the box:

Holding PTT and tapping Space mid-hold upgrades a hold into a toggled session without a gap in the audio. This is the single most useful detail of the chord system — short bursts feel fast, long-form narration feels hands-free, and there's no decision up front about which mode you wanted.

The on-screen pill

While you're dictating, a floating pill appears over the current app. It walks through the states of the capture cycle and shows live signals for each:

The pill is transparent, always-on-top, and pre-created hidden at app start — so it appears instantly when you hit the chord, with no window flash.

Customizing the chord

Open Settings → Captures → Dictation to change either chord.

• Left vs right modifier badges. When you hold keys into the chord picker, Sonna records whether each modifier is the left or right variant. That means you can bind to just the right ⌥ while leaving the left ⌥ alone — useful if you want dictation on one hand and keep your other-hand shortcuts intact.
• Chord defaults are picked to stay out of your way. On macOS, the defaults deliberately avoid left-hand Cmd+Option chords so Cmd+Option+I (devtools), Cmd+Option+Esc (force quit), and Cmd+Option+Space (Spotlight) all remain yours. On Windows, the defaults route around AltGr collisions on German / French / Spanish layouts where Ctrl+Alt synthesizes AltGr.
• Live reload. Changing a chord in Settings takes effect immediately — no restart, no tab reload.

Auto-paste into the focused app

Once transcription finishes, Sonna can synthesize a native paste into whatever text field had focus when you started the chord. Your clipboard is saved before and restored after, so nothing you had copied goes missing.

Focus is snapshotted at chord-start. The paste targets the original field even if focus drifts during transcribe / refine — that's the "pastes where you were talking from, not where you're looking now" behavior.

Refinement

If auto-refine is on, a local LLM cleans up the raw Whisper transcript before it's pasted. The goal is to remove verbal clutter without rewriting what you actually said.

What refinement typically fixes:

• Filler words (um, uh, like used as pauses, you know)
• Self-corrections — the LLM keeps the final version and drops earlier attempts (could you uh run the migration real quick, and then, yeah, check the logs → Could you run the migration, then check the logs?)
• Basic punctuation and capitalization
• Whisper loop hallucinations — Sonna strips repeated tokens (six or more identical tokens in a row, case-insensitive) before the LLM sees the transcript, so a small refinement model can't echo them back

What refinement deliberately preserves:

• Technical terms and code identifiers (npm install, handleSubmit)
• Legitimate repetition (no, no, no, no, no has fewer than six identical tokens, so it survives)
• Your intent — refinement is cleanup, not rewriting

Flags are snapshotted per capture, so you can re-refine the same raw transcript later with different flags without losing the original. The refinement model picker (Settings → Captures → Refinement) offers three bundled Qwen3 sizes:

This is the same local LLM used by the per-profile personality modes — one LLM in the app, not two. See Voice Personalities.

Platform notes

macOS

• Accessibility permission is required for auto-paste. The prompt lives inline next to the toggle in Settings → Captures → Dictation, with a deep link to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.
• TSM crash mitigation. The global hotkey listener runs on a background thread with set_is_main_thread(false) to sidestep a known macOS 14+ crash in the rdev library. If you hit an unexpected dictation failure on macOS, check the logs for TSM-related messages.

Windows

• UAC / UIPI caveat. Synthetic paste into an elevated window from a non-elevated Sonna is blocked by Windows itself. Run Sonna elevated if you regularly dictate into elevated apps (e.g. an elevated terminal or Task Manager).
• Right-hand default chord (Ctrl+Shift) avoids AltGr collisions on keyboard layouts where Ctrl+Alt is the compose key (German, French, Spanish, some others).

Linux

• Not yet in this release. The Rust shim ships the macOS and Windows paths in 0.5.0. Linux uinput / AT-SPI support and the Wayland paste story are tracked in docs/plans/VOICE_IO.md.

When auto-paste skips itself

A few cases where Sonna deliberately does not synthesize a paste:

• Focus was inside Sonna when the chord started. The transcript goes to the Captures tab so a dictation-into-Sonna round-trip doesn't accidentally paste into the generate box.
• No text focus detected. The transcript still lands in the Captures tab; copy it from there with one click.
• Accessibility permission not granted on macOS. Same — Captures tab only.

Next steps