You Can Now Dictate for a Full Hour

For a while, the longest you could dictate in EnviousWispr in one go was about ten minutes. I picked that number early on without thinking about it much. It was fine for what I used dictation for at the time: messages, commit notes, quick emails.

Then I started using it for the longer stuff, and ten minutes stopped being enough.

I would sit down to talk through a problem out loud, or get a first draft out while it was still in my head, and somewhere in the middle the recording would just end. I would lose my train of thought going back to check what happened. It turns out that when dictation is good enough to think in, ten minutes goes by fast.

So I raised it to a full hour.

A single dictation can now run for sixty minutes before it wraps up. That covers the sessions I actually wanted it for: a long voice memo, a meeting’s worth of notes while they are still fresh, or talking through a long script without stopping to restart. I am not watching a timer anymore, and I do not think you should have to either.

A couple of things I cared about while doing it.

It warns you before it stops. A long cap is useless if it surprises you, so as you get close to the hour a small warning shows up. And when it does reach the end, it stops cleanly and transcribes everything you said. You do not lose the last few minutes because the timer ran out. What you spoke is what you get. If holding a key for that long is awkward, double-press to lock it hands-free and just talk.

The hour does not change where the audio goes, which is still nowhere. The whole recording is transcribed on your Mac. No upload, no server, no account. That mattered to me at ten minutes and it matters more at sixty: an hour of you thinking out loud is exactly the kind of thing that should never leave your machine.

Short notes still work the way they always did. Hold the hotkey, speak, release, paste. The hour is just there for the days you have more to say.

Talk naturally. Paste perfectly.