Mac dictation not working: fixes by app and by cause

Dictation on a Mac usually fails for one of a small number of reasons, and which one it is depends on where you are typing. The fix in Chrome is not the fix in Terminal. Find your situation below.

If you only have a minute: dictation that works in some apps but not others is almost always a permission or a keyboard-interception problem in the app that is failing, not a fault in dictation itself. Dictation that works nowhere is usually the shortcut, the microphone selection, or a permission that was granted while the app was running and has not been picked up yet.

First work out which dictation you have, because the two behave differently. Apple's dictation is built into macOS and you switch it on in System Settings. A third-party app such as EaseMyPease, Wispr Flow or MacWhisper is a program you installed, and it needs permissions that Apple's own dictation never has to ask for.

Which key starts dictation on a Mac

There is no single shortcut that is correct on every Mac, which is why guides disagree. Apple lists three ways to start: “Press the Microphone key if available in the row of function keys on your Mac, use the Dictation keyboard shortcut, or choose Edit > Start Dictation.”

The shortcut itself is something you set. Open Apple menu > System Settings, click Keyboard in the sidebar, go to Dictation, and look at the Shortcut pop-up menu. “Press Fn (Function) Key Twice” is one of the options offered there rather than a guaranteed default. If pressing Fn twice does nothing on your Mac, that menu will tell you what it is actually set to.

Dictation stops on its own after a few seconds

This gets reported as a bug and is not one. Apple documents both halves of the behaviour: “You can dictate text of any length without a timeout”, and “Dictation stops automatically when no speech is detected for 30 seconds.”

So dictation will not cut you off mid-flow, but it does give up if you go quiet while thinking. If you pause to plan a sentence, it has already stopped listening by the time you start talking again.

Dictation not working in Chrome

Chrome needs its own microphone permission. macOS grants microphone access per app, not once for the whole machine, so allowing it for one app tells macOS nothing about Chrome. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone and check Chrome is switched on there.

Then quit Chrome completely with Cmd+Q and open it again. This step is the one people skip and it is usually why the switch looks on while nothing works. macOS decides what an app may do when the app launches, so a browser that was already running when you flipped the switch carries on believing it was refused.

Two more causes worth checking in Chrome, in this order:

1. A rich-text web editor. Gmail's compose window, Notion in the browser and Google Docs do not use ordinary text fields. They handle typed input themselves, and dictation that works in the address bar can fail inside one of them.
2. An extension eating the keystroke. Open an Incognito window, where extensions are off by default, and try the same shortcut. If dictation works there, an extension is intercepting it, and you can find which by re-enabling them a few at a time.

Dictation not working in Google Docs

This one is common enough to have its own search, and I want to be straight about what is actually known.

The reliable workaround people report is to change the dictation shortcut to something Google Docs does not claim. Docs binds a very large number of key combinations for its own editing commands, and a shortcut that works everywhere else can be swallowed inside a document. Assigning dictation a combination that Docs does not use gets it working again for most people.

The explanation usually given for this is that Google Docs draws its own editing surface instead of using a standard macOS text field, so the text-insertion path dictation relies on is not there. That explanation is repeated widely, but I could not confirm it against Apple or Google documentation. Treat it as a plausible account of a real symptom rather than an established fact.

Google Docs also has its own voice typing built in, under Tools > Voice typing, which uses Chrome's microphone rather than macOS dictation. When macOS dictation will not cooperate inside a document, that is the shortest way around it.

Dictation not working in Terminal

Terminal has a setting that blocks dictation by design, and it is not obvious that it is doing it.

It is called Secure Keyboard Entry, in the Terminal menu. Its purpose is to stop other processes on your Mac from reading what you type, which is a genuinely useful protection when you are entering passwords into a shell. The cost is that it also blocks the mechanism dictation and text-expanding apps use to put characters into the window. Turn it off in the Terminal menu, try dictation again, and switch it back on when you are done if you want the protection.

This is worth understanding rather than just toggling, because it explains a whole class of failure. Any app that types on your behalf, including every third-party dictation app, works by posting keyboard events into the system. Secure input exists specifically to stop that. When an app refuses dictation while every other app accepts it, secure input is the first thing to suspect, and some other terminal programs turn it on too.

Dictation not working with an external or USB microphone

Two separate settings have to agree, and changing one does not change the other.

1. System Settings > Sound > Input. This is the microphone macOS uses generally.
2. System Settings > Keyboard > Dictation > Microphone source. Dictation has its own selection. Apple describes the default this way: “If you choose Automatic, your Mac listens to the device you're most likely to use for Dictation.”

With a headset, a webcam and a built-in microphone all connected, “most likely to use” can be the wrong guess, and setting Sound > Input alone will not correct it. Point both at the microphone you want.

Before blaming dictation, open Voice Memos and record a few seconds. If the recording is silent or very quiet, the problem is the microphone or its input level, and dictation was never going to work.

The Bluetooth headset problem

This one is worth knowing because nothing on screen tells you it is happening.

A Bluetooth headset plays audio in one mode and takes microphone input in another. The moment any app asks it for microphone input, macOS switches the headset into its call mode, where the microphone is much lower quality than the sound it was playing a second earlier. Transcription accuracy falls with it, and what you get is not an obvious failure but a transcript full of plausible wrong words.

If dictation is getting words wrong while a headset is connected, try the same sentence on the Mac's built-in microphone before you blame the software. In EaseMyPease you pin the input under Settings, in Microphone > Input. Leaving it on System Default follows whatever macOS picked, which is convenient right up until macOS picks the headset.

Dictation during a video call

On a call, the call software already holds your microphone. Depending on how a dictation app asks for input, it can find the microphone busy and record nothing.

For EaseMyPease this was a real bug and it was fixed in version 0.2.2. Dictation works during FaceTime, Zoom and Google Meet calls from that version on. If you are on an older build, open the EaseMyPease menu and choose Check for Updates.

If you use a third-party dictation app

An app that listens to you and then types into another app needs three separate permissions from macOS, and it will look broken until it has all of them. They are in System Settings under Privacy & Security, each in its own list:

• Microphone, to hear you at all.
• Accessibility, so it can put the text into whatever app you are in.
• Input Monitoring, so it can notice the hotkey while you are working somewhere else.

Quit and reopen the app after granting any of them, for the same reason Chrome needs a relaunch.

There is also a failure that looks like a permission bug and is not. macOS ties a permission to the exact app file it granted it to, rather than to the app's name. Install an update and the switch can still show as on while pointing at a version that no longer exists on disk. The symptom is distinctive: the app reports that no sound was recorded, while Privacy & Security insists the microphone is allowed. Clear the grants and let it ask again. For EaseMyPease, quit it and run this in Terminal:

tccutil reset All com.kuldeep.EaseMyPease

Then reopen the app and accept the prompts. For a different app, use that app's bundle identifier instead.

If none of that moved it

Cloud-based dictation apps need an internet connection, EaseMyPease included, so check that first if the failure started suddenly and everything else is unchanged. Apple's built-in dictation can work offline for general text on Macs that process it on device. You can check which yours does: Apple's page says you can see in Keyboard settings “whether your voice inputs and transcripts for general text Dictation ... are processed on your device and not sent to Siri servers.”

The EaseMyPease support page has these steps written as a checklist for that app alone. If you are still stuck, email [email protected] and a person will answer, usually within a day.

Apple quotations on this page are from support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-dictation-mh40584/mac, read on 20 September 2026.