Before you begin
Complete installation, enable microphone and Accessibility permissions, and wait for the selected speech model to be ready. Onboarding automatically prepares the local speech selection; the new-install default is Parakeet v2 (English). Profiles and saved settings can change it. Start the seven-day trial or activate your license before starting new work.1
Place your cursor
Open Notes, TextEdit, your browser, or another app and click an editable field.
2
Start recording
Hold Fn/Globe, or press Option–Space to toggle recording. Use your saved shortcut if you changed it in Settings → General.
3
Speak and stop
Say a short sentence. Release the hold shortcut, or press the toggle shortcut again. Stenox transcribes the audio and applies enabled filler removal and vocabulary replacements.
4
Use the result
Text is inserted at the target or copied according to your output setting. The completion controls offer Copy, Polish, and Undo when available.
Polish when you want to
Open Text cleanup and enable Polish on demand to choose a local or Gemini model. After dictation, click Polish to request a rewrite using that selection. With polishing disabled, the control leads you to its settings. Remove filler words is independent of AI polishing. It removes clear hesitations without loading a language model. Dictation delivers this deterministic result first; it does not automatically run the selected AI model. The default local cleanup selection is Gemma 4 E4B, with polishing initially off. Local AI cleanup lists the available choices and their limits. Download and prepare a local model before using Polish; the Polish operation does not silently download a missing model or switch to a cloud provider.Review and recover
History retains the original dictation. When Stenox can verify the inserted text, Undo can remove a dictation or restore its pre-polish text. If the target or clipboard changed, Stenox may offer the polished text for Copy instead of replacing it. Review names, numbers, and important details before using an AI rewrite.Dictation and meeting capture cannot run at the same time. End the active meeting before starting a dictation.