Dictation & say-commands

Beyond the voice operator, o8 gives you system-wide dictation and a spoken command grammar — hands-free text and control in any app, not just o8.

Dictation

Hold the Fn key, speak, release — the polished text is inserted at your cursor. It's system-wide: it pastes at the caret of whatever app is frontmost — notes, browser, chat, your editor — not only o8.

• Double-tap Fn for long-form, open-mic dictation; a single Fn tap finishes, Esc cancels.
• Under the hood: on-device transcription captures what you said, an optional polish pass cleans up punctuation, casing, and obvious mishears (using what's on screen to spell names right), and the text is inserted without clobbering your real clipboard.
• A small floating dock pill — always on top, transparent — shows the state (idle → recording → polishing → done), so it works even when o8 is minimized.

Say-commands

While dictating, a few spoken edits are handled deterministically: "scratch that," "cancel," "new line," "new paragraph." And saying "say hello world" makes o8 speak "hello world" aloud instead of typing it.

Voice control

Hold the Option key and speak a request — "remind me to call Sydney at 4," "what's on my calendar," "open Figma," "draft an email to…" — and Symon runs a short reasoning loop over a catalog of native Mac and o8 actions (Reminders, Calendar, Notes, Mail, Shortcuts, files, plus o8's own status, dispatch, and approvals). Anything with a side effect hits the governance gate — Symon classifies it and asks before anything irreversible (see Symon).

Setup

First run asks for three macOS permissions, granted once:

• Input Monitoring — so the global hotkey works everywhere.
• Accessibility — to paste at the caret and read the current selection.
• Microphone — to hear you.

Dictation and the default macOS voice need no API keys. Higher-quality voices and the realtime voice mode are the opt-in extras.

The hotkeys