Guides

The floating status monitor

While the live-direct mic is held, SpeakWith can float a small pill above every other window. It shows one colored dot and one or two words: the mode you are in right now. You read it from across the room, or from the corner of your eye while you type in another app, without bringing SpeakWith forward. The diagram below shows the pill, its five modes, and the one thing it cannot replace.

Annotated diagram of the SpeakWith floating status monitor: a small rounded pill sitting over another app's window. It carries the SpeakWith mark, a blue dot, the words Type into app, and a smaller detail line reading Into open field. Below it, five smaller pills show the five modes with their colors: Recording in red, Type into app in blue, Voice pull in indigo, Listening in orange, and Monitoring in green, with a note that Listening is level mode and a hardware mute switch pauses and resumes it. A row of check marks reads Menu bar hidden, Dock hidden, SpeakWith in the background. At the bottom, three app icons carry small red Dock badges reading REC, TYPE, and a pause mark, captioned as the fallback.

What the pill shows

Four things, left to right. The SpeakWith mark, so you know whose badge it is when it is the only thing of ours on screen. A colored dot for the mode. The mode word beside the dot, because a color on its own is easy to misread and the word settles it. And, when there is something to add, a smaller detail line, for example when your words are going into an open text field.

The dot can pulse, fading in and out like the recording light in the sidebar: faster while recording or typing into another app, slower while listening. That is a separate switch, so you can keep the dot solid if a moving light in the corner of your eye is not what you want.

The five modes

Recording, in red: a take is running and going where it always goes, into your day document. Type into app, in blue: a take is running and being typed into whatever app is in front of you. Voice pull, in indigo: a take is running and a shell client is pulling the words instead. Listening, in orange: level mode standby, with the mic held and a take starting the moment you speak up. Monitoring, in green: the mic is held and metering, with no take running.

Blue against red is the comparison this pill exists to make easy. Before it, recording into your document and typing into another app looked the same from a distance, and finding out which one you were in meant switching to SpeakWith. Now a glance at the pill tells you whether your next sentence lands in your document or in the email you are looking at.

Listening is the mode to know about if your microphone has a hardware mute switch. Level mode watches the audio level rather than a button, so flipping the mute switch drops the level and pauses the recorder, and flipping it back resumes. No key, no click, no window to find: the orange dot tells you SpeakWith is waiting, and the pill going red tells you it heard you.

When more than one applies, the pill shows the one that matters most: Voice pull first, then Type into app, then Recording. It appears only in live-direct dictation. Batch capture, and the mic being off, show no pill at all.

Nothing else to keep on screen

The pill is its own small window. It takes no slot in the menu bar, needs no Dock, and never takes keyboard focus, so it cannot steal a keystroke from the app you are typing into. You can hide the menu bar and the Dock, put SpeakWith in the background, fill the screen with the app you are working in, and the pill is still there.

Drag it anywhere once and it stays put, on top of everything, until you power the mic off. Many people park it in a corner next to where their words are landing, so the mode and the text sit in one glance.

If you keep the Dock showing

The Dock badge is the fallback. SpeakWith's Dock icon reads REC while recording, TYPE while typing into another app, and a pause mark while listening in level mode. It is there whether or not the pill is, and it is enough if your Dock is always visible and you only need to know that a take is running.

What it cannot do is color-code the modes: macOS paints every Dock badge the same red, whatever the word inside it. That is the reason the floating monitor exists, and the reason it, not the badge, is the one to reach for when you type into other apps.

Turning it on

Settings, Dictation, under Type into app: Show mode indicator floats the pill; Pulse the mode indicator makes the dot breathe. Both are in the direct-download builds of SpeakWith. The Mac App Store build keeps the Dock badge.