The two permissions Mac dictation needs.

The microphone is the half nobody has to have explained. The app opens a capture session, macOS asks you once, and the orange dot sits in the menu bar for as long as it is listening. That grant covers the audio and nothing else.

The second one surprises people, because dictation is not obviously an accessibility feature. It is asked for because of where the key is and where the text has to go. A hold-to-talk key is not a menu shortcut inside one window: the app has to know that the key went down while a completely different app had focus, and Aside watches for that with an event tap, which the system puts behind Accessibility. Then the text has to arrive in the app you were actually typing in, which means synthesising input into a process that is not yours, and that sits behind the same grant.

In Aside the insertion is a pasteboard swap: the text goes on the clipboard, a paste is synthesised, and what was on your clipboard before is put back. That is why the app works in every app that accepts a paste, without a plug-in or an extension for any of them, and it is also why the Accessibility grant is not optional.

Accessibility grants do not always survive a major macOS update, and they can also be lost to a migration or a reinstall. The app is the same app and its row is often still sitting in the list, so nothing about the Mac looks changed.

What changes is the symptom, and the symptom is exactly nothing. You hold the key and no indicator appears, no text arrives, no error is shown, because without the event tap the app is never told the key went down in the first place. There is no failure to report; there is an event that never reached anybody. An app can notice that it has lost the grant and say so, but it cannot tell you which keystroke you meant.

So the rule of thumb is short: dictation that worked yesterday and does nothing today is a permissions question until proven otherwise, and the first place to look is the Accessibility list rather than the microphone.

1. Open the list. System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Accessibility. Microphone is its own row in the same Privacy & Security pane, a little further up, and it is worth a glance while you are there.
2. Toggle the app off and on again. Find Aside in the list and switch it off, then on. This is the part that matters: a stale grant and a live one look identical in that list, so a switch that is already on proves nothing, and turning it off and back on is what re-establishes it.
3. Relaunch the app. The event tap is installed when the app starts, so quitting and reopening Aside is part of the fix rather than superstition.
4. Test somewhere harmless. Hold the key in a plain text field, TextEdit or a new note, before trusting it in the document you were actually working on.
5. Check the other three. Which key dictation is set to, whether the app you are in is on the block list, and whether dictation is still inside its seven days or covered by Aside Pro.

If the text still does not appear, check what has focus. A password field will not take it, and that is the next section rather than a fault.

A system-wide key is system-wide, which is convenient until it is not. There are apps where a held key means something else already, and apps where you would simply rather no paste ever arrived. Aside keeps a block list in settings for exactly that: name the app and dictation stays out of it, while the key keeps working everywhere else.

An app that can type into any window ought to give you a way to say which windows, and the setting costs one line in a list rather than an argument about trust.

While a password field has focus, macOS turns on secure input. Aside leaves password fields and secure input untouched, so nothing is transcribed into them and nothing is typed there. No amount of permission granting changes that, and it is not a bug to be worked around.

So test dictation in a normal text field: TextEdit, a new note, a search box. Copy last dictation puts the text of your last take back on the clipboard if something else has overwritten it since.

The same command is the reason the last ten dictations are kept at all. They live in Aside’s folder in Application Support as text and nothing else: no audio is retained, so there is no recording of your voice sitting on the disk waiting to be found.

Both permissions are a conversation between the app and macOS, and nothing about either one reaches a server. The speech is turned into text on the Mac as well, by one model of about 1.5 GB that Aside downloads when you set dictation up. That download is the only time dictation wants a connection; after it, the model runs on the machine and nothing you say leaves the Mac.

Which is worth knowing mostly as a diagnostic. When the key does nothing, the connection is not the thing to check, and neither is the wifi in the café. It is the list in System Settings first, and after that the key you set, the block list and whether your dictation access is still running.

Aside dictates system-wide. Hold fn and talk, double tap it to latch the microphone open for a long take, and press escape while you are still holding to throw the take away. If fn is spoken for on your Mac, settings moves dictation to right ⌘, right ⌥, F13 or F5. The text lands at the cursor in whatever app you were in, cleaned up by rules rather than rewritten by a model, and your clipboard is put back the way you left it. It understands about 99 languages, the ones your Mac is set to, and works out which one you are speaking. It needs Microphone and Accessibility, it needs macOS 26 or later, and it is free for 7 days from the day you set it up and part of Aside Pro after that.

The dictation page is here, what happens to meeting audio afterwards is the transcription guide, and a dictation-first alternative is laid out on the Superwhisper comparison.

Last updated 14 September 2026.