Troubleshooting

The hotkey does nothing

Almost always Accessibility. VoxFlow needs it both to watch for ⌥ ⌃ and to paste, and macOS gives no visible error when it is missing.

Check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, then quit and relaunch VoxFlow. If you have rebuilt the app since granting access, remove the stale entry and add it again — see Permissions.

Recording produces nothing

• Confirm Microphone access is granted, and that VoxFlow is listed. It only appears after the app has asked for it at least once.
• Check that the input device macOS is using is the one you are speaking into.
• Very short utterances can be trimmed away entirely by voice activity detection. Try again with a full sentence.

Text is transcribed but never appears

Insertion works by putting text on the clipboard and sending a synthetic ⌘ V. Some apps refuse synthetic input, and secure fields refuse it by design.

The transcript is still on your clipboard and still in history, so paste it yourself. If a specific app fails consistently, it is worth opening an issue with the app named.

Transcription is slow

• VoxFlow requires Apple Silicon and macOS 26. Older or Intel Macs are not supported.
• Confirm the Apple language asset and large-v3-turbo fallback show Ready under Speech settings.
• Check whether the delay is transcription or the rewrite call by running with RUST_LOG=voxflow=info and reading the stage timings — see Performance budget.

The rewrite pass fails

• Confirm the key is present in Keychain and correct for the provider you selected.
• For a Custom Endpoint, confirm the base URL is reachable from this machine right now. A home server over a VPN is only reachable while the VPN is up.
• On repeated failure the raw transcript is still inserted, so a broken rewrite provider degrades to plain dictation rather than losing your words.

The build fails

• whisper-rs needs CMake. brew install cmake.
• Xcode Command Line Tools must be installed: xcode-select --install.
• Clear stale build state with cargo clean and rebuild if the workspace has been switched between branches.