Using Flunkey · F8
Dictating with F8
Hold F8, speak naturally, release — polished text lands at your cursor in any app. This guide covers the full loop plus the details that matter in real workflows.
The basics
- Click into any text field — email, doc, chat, terminal, code editor
- Hold
F8. The pill lights up; a sound confirms recording - Speak at a normal pace, including pauses and self-corrections
- Release (holds over 300ms finish on release). Transcription → dictionary + grammar polish → paste at the cursor
you say: "send priya the invoice tuesday... actually wednesday morning"
you get: "Send Priya the invoice Wednesday morning."Hands-free mode
Double-tap F8 to start recording without holding. A quick tap (300ms or less) waits 380ms for a second tap; two taps within 400ms lock into hands-free. The pill shows elapsed state with confirm and cancel actions — press F8 again or ✓ to confirm and paste, ✕ to discard. Distinct sounds mark hands-free start, confirm, and cancel so you never wonder whether you are live.
Transcription & polish
Speech-to-text runs on your assigned STT provider: Groq whisper-large-v3-turbo, OpenAI whisper-1 / gpt-4o-mini-transcribe / gpt-4o-transcribe, or Gemini native audio. Before transcribing, Flunkey injects your Dictionary into the model — up to 10 relevant words in a 650-char Whisper prompt — so names like “Groq, Flunkey, VS Code” come out right.
Grammar polish then runs when the Dictionary F8 toggle is ON: Groq uses openai/gpt-oss-20b (other providers use their polish model, 12s timeout, raw text fallback). Gemini skips LLM polish — its output is already clean. If refusal detection spots a model lecturing instead of transcribing (“I can’t help with…”), nothing pastes and you get a Transcription blocked toast.
How paste works
Flunkey pastes via Ctrl+V (or Ctrl+Shift+V where the app profile calls for it) with per-app handling for code, chat, notes, terminals, and mail — then restores your previous clipboard contents when Preserve Clipboard is ON (the default). Every dictation is saved to Transcripts first, tagged with the app name, so a failed paste never loses text — just Ctrl+V manually. Empty results produce a Didn’t catch that toast instead of pasting silence.
Elevated windows
Transcripts history
The Transcripts page keeps every dictation with its app name and date — entries show a 280-char clamp with expand + copy, and search covers both app and date. It is the fastest way to recover text when a paste misfires.
Elevated windows
Dictation patterns
- Correct out loud: “at five… actually six pm” resolves to 6 pm
- Format by intent: “numbered list: first… second…” becomes a list
- Names stick: add people, products, and acronyms once in Dictionary & Polish
- Prompts count: dictate long AI prompts into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor verbatim