User Manual · v3
A push-to-talk speech-to-text utility for Windows. Press a hotkey, speak, and your words land in whatever app you were just using — fully offline, powered by Whisper.
A small, focused desktop tool that turns your voice into text anywhere on Windows — no browser, no cloud, no account.
Win Dictation sits quietly in your system tray. When you want to dictate, you press a global hotkey, speak a sentence or a paragraph, then press the hotkey again. A second or two later the transcribed text is copied to your clipboard and — by default — automatically pasted into whatever window you were using: your email, a chat box, a code editor, a document.
Everything happens on your computer. The audio never leaves the machine; transcription runs locally using whisper.cpp, a compact build of OpenAI's Whisper model. That means it works on a plane, behind a firewall, or anywhere with no internet at all.
Built for modest hardware
This build is tuned for an ordinary CPU-only laptop — the kind with two physical cores and no graphics card. It uses a fast, lightweight model by default and keeps your processor nearly idle while you speak, only working hard for a brief moment after you stop.
Three steps. No setup, no sign-in.
The window opens and a microphone icon appears in your system tray. Wait a moment for the status line to change from “Loading model…” to “Ready”.
Put your cursor in the email, chat box, or document first. Then hit the hotkey. The Record button turns red and a green level meter shows it’s hearing you.
Talk naturally. When you’re done, press Ctrl+Shift+Space once more. A short progress bar runs, and your words appear — pasted straight into the app you were using.
That's the whole loop
Press to start, speak, press to finish. The text is on your clipboard and dropped into your previous window. You never have to click back into Win Dictation.
The whole app is a single window. Here is every control on it.
That one line of dim text under the Record button tells you everything about the app's state:
| You see | It means |
|---|---|
Loading model… | Starting up — the speech model is being read into memory. Wait a second. |
Ready · 2 threads | Idle and ready to record. The number is how many CPU threads it will use. |
Recording 0:14 | Listening. The timer counts how long you've been speaking. A green level meter pulses with your voice. |
Transcribing 0:14 · 62% · 3s left | Working on your audio. The bar fills and the countdown ticks down to zero. |
Pasted / Copied | Done. Your text went to the clipboard (and into your previous window if auto-paste is on). |
No speech detected | The clip was silent or too short to transcribe. Nothing was added. |
Win Dictation is push-to-talk, not live streaming. You record a whole clip, then it transcribes the whole thing at once.
This is a deliberate design choice. Instead of trying to transcribe word-by-word as you speak (which pins a CPU at 100% and stutters on a modest laptop), Win Dictation simply records your audio cheaply while you talk, then does one fast transcription pass the moment you stop. The result is calmer, more accurate, and far lighter on your battery.
There is no “stop on silence”
Recording continues until you press the hotkey again (or click Stop). Pausing to think won't end the session — take your time. The only automatic stop is a safety cap at 10 minutes per clip.
Unlike many dictation tools, the text area is fully editable. Click anywhere in it to fix a misheard word, delete a stray sentence, or type manually. When you dictate again, the new text is inserted at your cursor — so you can build up a document piece by piece, placing each new chunk exactly where you want it.
Two global shortcuts work from anywhere in Windows, even when the window is hidden.
If the hotkey doesn't work
You may see Hotkey in use — edit win-dictation.ini. That means another program already grabbed Ctrl+Shift+Space. You can change it by editing the hkMods and hkVk values in the win-dictation.ini file (see the FAQ).
The feature that makes Win Dictation feel invisible: it types into other apps for you.
When you trigger recording, the app notes which window had focus a moment before. After transcription, if Auto-paste is enabled (it is by default), it brings that window back to the front and pastes your text there automatically. You dictate, and the words appear in your email — you never touch Win Dictation's own window.
If you'd rather paste manually, turn auto-paste off in the tray menu. The text is always still copied to your clipboard, and the Paste button will send it to your last window on demand.
Pair it with Auto-hide
Turn on Auto-hide (tray menu) and the window disappears the instant it pastes. Combined with the global hotkey, dictation becomes a pure overlay: tap, speak, tap, and your words flow into whatever you're doing.
Every dictation session is saved automatically, so you never lose a transcript.
A session is everything you dictate between clears. As soon as you finish your first clip, Win Dictation writes it to a timestamped text file. Each additional clip in that session updates the same file — so one session is one tidy file, kept up to date as you go.
Click the History selector to open the list. Each entry shows its date, time, and a short preview of the text. Click one to load it back into the transcript box. The most recent sessions are at the top, and up to 100 sessions are kept (older ones are pruned automatically).
Hover over any history row and a small ✕ appears on its right edge — click it to delete that session's file. You can also press Delete on the hovered row. The list stays open after each delete so you can tidy up several at once. The window even shrinks to fit as the list gets shorter.
Deletion is permanent
Removing a history entry deletes its text file from disk immediately — there is no confirmation prompt and no undo. The files themselves live in a history\ folder next to the program, if you ever want to back them up.
A model is the AI that turns sound into words. Bigger models are more accurate but slower. Click the cog to manage them.
The Settings screen lists every model Win Dictation can use. Each row shows the model's name, file size, and a short hint. Installed models have a filled radio button you can select; ones you don't have yet show a Download button that fetches them directly from Hugging Face with a live progress percentage.
| Model | Size | Character | |
|---|---|---|---|
tiny.en | ~75 MB | The default. Quick and light — ideal for this CPU. | fastest |
tiny.en-q8_0 | ~42 MB | Same speed, smaller file (compressed). | fastest |
base.en-q5_1 | ~59 MB | A noticeable accuracy bump for little cost. | good balance |
base.en | ~142 MB | More accurate; still reasonable on two cores. | balance |
small.en-q5_1 | ~182 MB | Accurate, but slow on this machine. | slow here |
small.en | ~466 MB | The most accurate offered — and the slowest. | slowest |
A good rule of thumb
Stick with tiny.en or base.en-q5_1 for everyday use on a two-core laptop. Step up to base.en if you want better accuracy and don't mind waiting a beat longer. The small models are best reserved for short, important clips where accuracy matters most.
You'll notice the transcription countdown is unusually accurate. That's because Win Dictation measures how fast your specific computer is with each model and remembers it. The more you use a model, the better its time estimates become — the bar counts steadily down rather than jumping around.
Win Dictation lives in the tray. Right-click its icon for the quick options menu.
Paste transcribed text into your previous window automatically. On by default.
Keep the window above other apps. Mirrors the Pin button. On by default.
Hide the window automatically right after it pastes. Off by default.
Fully quits the app. Closing the window only hides it to the tray — use this to stop it entirely.
Double-clicking the tray icon brings the window back. Closing the window with the ✕ doesn't quit — it just hides, so the hotkey keeps working in the background. Your window position, pinned state, and these toggles are all remembered between launches.
Scroll down in Settings to see a running tally of your dictation habits.
Win Dictation quietly keeps lifetime totals and turns them into friendly figures:
These numbers are stored locally and are just for your own curiosity — nothing is reported anywhere.
Put your text cursor in the destination app before pressing the hotkey, so auto-paste knows where to send the words.
Whisper transcribes best with full sentences and natural rhythm. You don't need to over-enunciate or pause between words.
If accuracy is poor, check the Microphone selector — a headset or dedicated mic beats a distant laptop mic in a noisy room.
Quick chat replies? tiny.en. A careful paragraph of prose? Try base.en for fewer corrections.
Fix the odd misheard word right in the transcript box, then Copy — faster than re-recording the whole thing.
The very first transcription after launch can be a touch slower as the model settles into memory. It's quick from then on.
| Symptom | What to do |
|---|---|
| “Model not found” | The selected .bin model file is missing. Open Settings and download a model (start with tiny.en), or place a .bin file in the models\ folder next to the program and restart. |
| “Hotkey in use” | Another app owns Ctrl+Shift+Space. Change the hotkey in win-dictation.ini, or close the conflicting app. You can still record by clicking the Record button. |
| “Microphone error” | The chosen input device couldn't be opened. Pick a different mic from the selector, make sure it isn't in use by another app, and check Windows mic permissions. |
| “No speech detected” | The clip was silent, too quiet, or under ~0.3 seconds. Check the level meter moves when you talk, and confirm the right mic is selected. |
| Text pasted into the wrong place | Auto-paste targets whatever window was focused just before you pressed the hotkey. Click into your destination first. If in doubt, turn auto-paste off and use the Paste button deliberately. |
| Transcription feels slow | You're likely on a larger model. Switch to tiny.en or base.en-q5_1 in Settings. The small models are inherently slow on a two-core CPU. |
| Window vanished | It hid to the tray. Double-click the tray icon, press Ctrl+Shift+H, or right-click the tray icon → Show Window. |
No. All recording and transcription happen on your computer. The only time the app reaches the internet is when you click Download to fetch a model file.
Yes — once you have at least one model installed, no internet is needed ever again.
This build is tuned for English (the .en models). It's optimised for accuracy and speed in English on modest hardware.
Everything sits next to win-dictation.exe:
| Location | What's there |
|---|---|
| models\ | Your downloaded .bin speech models. |
| history\ | One text file per dictation session. |
| win-dictation.ini | Your settings, hotkey, window position, learned timing, and statistics. |
| win-dictation.log | A simple timestamped activity log, handy if something misbehaves. |
Open win-dictation.ini in any text editor and edit the hkMods and hkVk values under [app] (they're standard Windows key codes), then restart the app. A built-in settings option for this is a natural future addition.
It's toggle-style push-to-talk: one press starts, another stops. You're not transcribing live as you speak — you capture a clip, then it's processed. This is what keeps it fast and light on a CPU-only machine.