SpeaklySpeakly

Choosing your shortcut

One global shortcut, with keyboard rules worth knowing

Speakly uses a single global shortcut. Hold it to talk, or tap it to start and tap again to stop; two quick taps open Agent Mode. There are no separate per-mode shortcuts. While a dictation is recording, esc cancels it — the audio is thrown away and nothing is pasted; outside a recording, Speakly leaves esc alone.

How it behaves

Open Settings → General → Keyboard shortcut → View and choose one of three behaviours under How it behaves:

  • Hold or tap (the default) — hold the shortcut down and speak, let go and Speakly transcribes; or tap it once to start and tap again to stop.
  • Hold to talk — recording happens only while the key is held down.
  • Tap to toggle — tap to start, tap again to stop; holding does nothing. This is what Speakly did before.

The line between a tap and a hold is 250 ms: let go sooner and it counts as a tap, keep the key down longer and it is push-to-talk. In hybrid mode, if the app receives the whole gesture late and has had less than 250 ms to react, recording continues until the next tap to avoid stopping immediately. Holding needs Speakly's own key listener, which ships on both macOS and Windows. On macOS it needs Accessibility permission; without that the shortcut falls back to Tap to toggle and the other two options are greyed out.

Changing it

  1. Open Settings → General
  2. Under Keyboard shortcut, click View
  3. Press the combination you want
  4. Close it — the new shortcut applies immediately, no restart
A modifier on its own is allowed
The default is exactly that — a lone Right ⌘. Speakly does not swallow a modifier-only shortcut, so ⌘C and every other shortcut on that key keep working: press the modifier and then another key within about 0.4 s and Speakly reads it as an ordinary shortcut and records nothing. This needs Speakly's native key listener; without it (macOS without Accessibility permission) a modifier-only shortcut falls back to Right ⌘ + Right ⇧ + Space.

Left and right modifiers are different keys

The default deliberately uses a right-hand modifier (the Right ⌘ key on macOS, Right Ctrl + Enter on Windows) to leave the left-hand ones free, since nearly every system and application shortcut uses those. Switch to a left-hand modifier and expect more conflicts. If you had already picked your own combination, Speakly keeps it: the new default only reaches installs that never changed it.

If the shortcut stops working

  • Another app registered the same combination first — first to register wins
  • Pick a different combination under Settings → General → Keyboard shortcut → View
  • On macOS, also check Input Monitoring under Settings → Permissions
Choosing your shortcut — Speakly