Most dictation tools require you to be inside their own window. You switch apps, click record, speak, copy, switch back. Hovor's global hotkey eliminates all of that: press your shortcut from anywhere on macOS, speak, and the transcribed text is pasted directly into whatever field your cursor is already in.
A global hotkey lets Hovor capture your voice from inside any macOS app, without opening Hovor's own window first. Hovor runs as a background menu bar app and listens for the key system-wide through a macOS event tap; press it, speak, and the formatted transcript is pasted directly into whatever field currently has focus — Mail, Slack, a terminal, a browser form — with no app-switching, no copy, no paste step of your own.
Without a hotkey, the sequence is: open Hovor, click record, speak, wait for transcription, copy the result, switch back to your original app, paste. A global hotkey collapses all of that to two actions: press the key, speak.
The practical effect is that voice typing becomes genuinely ambient: no context switching, no workflow interruption, no hunting for a recording button. Dictation becomes as fast as reaching for the keyboard, and for longer passages, considerably faster.
Hovor on macOS ships four hotkey modes: Hold (push-to-talk, the factory default), Toggle (press to start, press again to stop), and two hands-free modes — auto-stop and continuous — that run on the on-device Parakeet model. Hold and Toggle work with any transcription backend; the two hands-free modes automatically fall back to Toggle behavior whenever Parakeet is not the currently active speech model.
| Mode | Starts on | Stops on | Requires Parakeet | Default |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hold (push-to-talk) | Key down | Key release | No | Yes |
| Toggle | 1st press | 2nd press | No | No |
| Hands-free (auto-stop) | 1 press | Automatic, on first pause | Yes | No |
| Hands-free (continuous) | 1 press | Manual, next press | Yes | No |
The classic push-to-talk pattern, and the mode Hovor ships with: hold the shortcut key down while speaking, release to stop. Recording lasts exactly as long as the key is pressed. This mode suits users who dictate many short, precise insertions in quick succession: a single name, a number, a brief command. The moment you release, the text is sent.
One press begins recording; the same key ends it. It works well when you dictate full sentences and want complete control over exactly when the recording starts and stops, without needing to keep a key held down. Press once, speak as long as you like, press once more to finish.
When the hotkey fires, Hovor's paste routine reads the frontmost app's identity at the moment recording started, then — once transcription and formatting finish — delivers the text back to that same app, either by filling the system clipboard and simulating Cmd+V or by injecting the text as synthetic keystrokes (the method Hovor picks automatically per app, e.g. keystroke delivery for terminals so they don't collapse a paste into a placeholder). Both delivery paths depend on the Accessibility permission described below.
This works across essentially every macOS app: mail clients, document editors, terminals, chat apps, web forms in your browser, notes, code editors, and more. There is no special per-app integration or plugin required.
One practical implication: you can have multiple apps open, click a text field in any one of them, and immediately press the hotkey. Hovor speaks into whichever field you just clicked. You never have to tell it where to send the text.
Hands-free auto-stop and hands-free continuous are two of Hovor's four hotkey modes, and both require the on-device Parakeet speech model to be the active transcription backend on macOS; Hold and Toggle instead use Hovor's server-side pipeline (included in the free tier and Pro), independent of Parakeet. With auto-stop, one hotkey press starts recording and Hovor ends it by itself the moment it detects a pause in your speech — no second press needed. With continuous, one press keeps the microphone active across multiple phrases, pasting each segment as you pause, until you press the key again to stop manually.
If Parakeet is not the active speech model — for example, on a device below the 4 GB RAM gate Parakeet requires — both hands-free modes automatically behave like Toggle instead of silently failing.
Hovor's factory-default hotkey is Option+Space (⌥Space) in Hold mode. To change either the key or the mode, open Hovor → Settings → Hotkey, click the shortcut field, and press any combination you want: a modifier plus a letter, number, or function key, or a single modifier key alone (Right Option, Fn, and similar keys work with no companion key required). The change takes effect immediately, with no restart.
Worth a moment's thought: pick a binding that doesn't collide with a shortcut you already rely on heavily in another app. Combinations built on fn, a dedicated function key, or a multi-modifier chord tend to have the fewest collisions.
The global hotkey needs exactly one macOS permission — Accessibility (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility) — and nothing else; Hovor does not use the separate Input Monitoring permission for this feature. Without Accessibility granted, the key-capture event tap never starts, so pressing the hotkey does nothing at all. If Accessibility is revoked mid-session, the hotkey keeps detecting key presses, but every paste attempt is silently skipped: the transcript still gets saved into Hovor's history, it just never reaches the app you were dictating into.
The global hotkey, with all four activation modes described above, ships only on macOS today. It does not exist on Windows or iOS in the current release: the Windows client's global hotkey is planned for its in-progress Tauri rewrite but has not shipped, and iOS has no global-hotkey API for third-party apps at all.
| Capability | macOS | Windows | iOS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global hotkey | Shipped | Not shipped (Tauri rewrite in progress) | Not possible — no OS API |
| Hold / Toggle modes | Yes | — | — |
| Hands-free (Parakeet) modes | Yes | — | — |
| Dictate into any app | Via global hotkey | Not yet | Via custom keyboard extension |
On iOS, Hovor instead ships a custom system keyboard extension: you enable it once (Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard), then activate it from any text field in any app — a different mechanism, but serving the same goal of dictating without leaving the app you are in.
Out of the box, Hovor's global hotkey is Option+Space (⌥Space) in Hold mode: hold the keys down while speaking, release to stop and paste. Both the key and the mode are fully configurable in Hovor → Settings → Hotkey — you can rebind to any single modifier key (like Right Option or Fn) or any modifier-plus-key combination, and switch the trigger mode to Toggle, hands-free auto-stop, or hands-free continuous.
The hotkey needs the Accessibility permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility). Without it, Hovor's key-capture event tap never starts, so pressing the hotkey does nothing at all. If Accessibility is revoked after the app is already running, the hotkey still detects key presses, but every paste attempt is silently skipped — the spoken text is transcribed and saved to Hovor's history, it just never lands in the app you were dictating into. Hovor does not require the separate Input Monitoring permission for this feature.
Hold (push-to-talk) is the default: recording runs only while the key is physically held down, and stops the instant you release it. Toggle needs one press to start and one more press to stop, so you can speak with both hands off the keyboard in between. The two hands-free modes — auto-stop and continuous — both need a single press to start and use Hovor's on-device Parakeet model to detect pauses in your speech automatically; auto-stop ends the recording after the first pause, while continuous keeps listening and pasting each segment until you press the key again. If Parakeet is not the active speech model, both hands-free modes automatically behave like Toggle instead.
No. The global hotkey is a macOS-only feature today. The Windows client is being rebuilt as a native Tauri app, and a global hotkey is planned for that rewrite, but it has not shipped in any release yet. iOS does not expose a global-hotkey API to third-party apps at all, so Hovor's iPhone and iPad app uses a different mechanism instead: a custom system keyboard extension you enable once and can then activate from the keyboard in any app's text field.
Yes. Hovor recognizes nine modifier-only key codes — both Command keys, both Shift keys, both Option keys, both Control keys, and Fn — as valid standalone hotkeys. When one of these is set as the trigger, Hovor watches for that key's own press-and-release state directly instead of requiring a companion letter or number key, and lets the key's normal system function pass through unaffected for every other app.
The free tier includes 2000 words/week of cloud dictation. Pro Monthly is $11.99/month; Pro Yearly is $89.99/year. Local Unlock ($49.99, one-time, family-shareable) adds unlimited on-device dictation via Parakeet.
Download Hovor for macOS. Set your hotkey, press it anywhere, and speak. Your text appears where your cursor is. Free tier included.
Get Hovor for Mac