How text is inserted
The last step of every dictation is putting the text where your cursor is. It is worth understanding, because it is the step that touches your clipboard.
What happens on release
Once the text is ready, OpenVoiceFlow:
- Saves your clipboard — every item and every format currently on it, not just plain text.
- Puts the dictated text on the clipboard and synthesizes a ⌘V keystroke into the frontmost app.
- Restores your original clipboard a fraction of a second later.
The net effect is that text appears at your cursor and whatever you had copied before is still there afterward. That restore step is the reason dictating does not quietly destroy the URL or image you were about to paste.
Synthesizing a paste inserts the whole passage at once, correctly, in any app. Synthesizing individual keystrokes would be slower, would break on non-ASCII characters, and would interleave badly with autocomplete. The trade-off is that this route needs Accessibility permission and briefly uses the clipboard.
When pasting is blocked
If Accessibility permission is missing or has been revoked, the app cannot press ⌘V for you. Rather than losing your words, it deliberately leaves the dictated text on your clipboard and the HUD says Copied instead — press ⌘V, with a button that takes you to the permission.
So a failed paste is never a lost dictation: your text is one manual paste away. Fix the permission and the next take inserts normally.
Turning auto-paste off
Dashboard ▸ Settings ▸ Dictation ▸ Paste automatically controls this. With it off, OpenVoiceFlow transcribes and shows you the result but does not press ⌘V and does not touch your clipboard at all.
People turn this off when they want to review before inserting, or when working in an app where an unexpected paste would be disruptive.
What the HUD shows afterward
By default the HUD briefly echoes the tail of what was inserted, so you can confirm it landed correctly without switching windows. If you dictate sensitive material — passwords, medical notes — turn off Show what was typed in the HUD in Settings and the HUD shows a word count instead.
App compatibility
Anywhere with a text cursor works: Mail, Slack, Safari, Chrome, Notes, Word, Notion, VS Code, Xcode, Terminal, iTerm. If a particular app refuses pasted text, that app is usually intercepting ⌘V itself; turning off auto-paste and pasting manually is the reliable workaround.
Documentation for OpenVoiceFlow 0.5.5 · last updated 2026-07-31. Something wrong or missing here? That is a bug — tell us at shimoverse@gmail.com.