Quick start
These steps take you from a fresh install to text at your cursor, and then to recognition that keeps the audio on your computer.
Your first dictation
- Start Voltip. It opens on the home page, ready to dictate with the default service.
- Grant the permissions it asks for. A missing permission — the microphone, and on macOS also Accessibility, which Voltip needs to paste — appears on the home page with a button that opens the right setting.
- Put the cursor in any text field, hold Ctrl Alt Space, speak, and release.
The text appears at the cursor, and the result is listed under the latest results on the home page.
If nothing arrives, press Test microphone on the home page and say a few words: the strength bar should move. Questions and troubleshooting covers the usual causes.
The setup guide under Settings → General walks through the shortcut, the recognition service and a test dictation.
Recognise on your own computer
To keep the audio on your computer:
- Open Speech models in the sidebar and choose This computer.
- Download a model. Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (690 MB) is the recommended one; SenseVoice Small (240 MB) is the smallest.
- Select the model when the download is finished.
From then on, no audio leaves the computer. Local recognition compares the models and explains when the graphics card is used.
On Linux with Wayland
A pure Wayland session does not let apps register global shortcuts. Bind a shortcut in your desktop's keyboard settings to the command voltip-desktop --toggle, and to voltip-desktop --edit-toggle for voice edit. Settings → Shortcuts shows the exact command for your installation, including the path of an AppImage.
Next steps
- Choose how recording starts and stops: Shortcuts and recording modes
- Turn AI polish on or off with the AI polish switch in the title bar: AI polish
- Teach Voltip your names and terms: Dictionary and rules