I hold the key and nothing happens
- Check the pill. If it says a permission is missing, click it — it opens the right settings pane. Both Microphone and Accessibility must be on.
- Make sure a text field is actually focused (cursor blinking) in the app you want the text in.
- Confirm you are holding the right key: fn for Fiction, right ⌥ for Plain.
- If you recently installed a signed build, macOS may have reset the grants once — toggle Murmurtale off and on in both panes a single time.
Names and terms come out wrong
Add them to a dictionary, with a sounds-like hint for anything stubborn. Make sure the dictionary is enabled and scoped to the mode you are dictating in.
It says “No speech detected” or “Possible noise”
Murmurtale refuses to insert audio it cannot hear clearly, which protects your page from coughs and silence. Check that the right microphone is selected in macOS Sound settings and that you are speaking while holding the key. The capture stays in History with Play and Retry so you can recover it.
Cloud dictation seems slow or unavailable
If the cloud engine cannot be reached, Murmurtale automatically transcribes on-device and notes "Cloud unavailable — transcribed on-device" in History. Your text still appears. The first dialogue-intelligence request after launching the app also pays a couple of seconds of one-time startup.
Dictation does not land in a password field
That is expected. See Supported apps for how secure fields behave and why you should type passwords by hand.