Recording Pill

When a recording starts, a small always-on-top window appears with the elapsed time and your audio level. It opens on the display where the mouse cursor is, so on a multi-monitor setup it follows the screen you are working on.

Where it appears

There are two styles, and they sit in different places:

• Floating Pill (the default) — 340 x 100 px, centred horizontally and 25 px above the bottom of the screen's work area. The tile in Settings calls it Floating Pill / “Bottom center of screen”.
• Dynamic Island — 340 x 37 px pinned to the very top of the screen, wrapped around the MacBook notch.

Pick the style in Settings → System, under Recording indicator style. That selector is rendered on macOS only: on Windows and Linux the Floating Pill is always used and there is nothing to choose.

The pill is shown as soon as recording starts. There is no appearance-delay setting anywhere in the app.

What it shows

• Timer — elapsed time as m:ss, counting up.
• Audio bars — one bar per frequency band, bass on the left. They follow your voice and stay flat while you are not speaking: the pill calibrates itself to your room, so a fan or an air conditioner does not move them.
• Microphone name — appears for the first three seconds of the recording, then disappears. The Floating Pill floats it above the pill; the Dynamic Island hangs it in a bubble just below the notch.
• Prompt dot — a small dot at the left end of the pill; on the Dynamic Island it sits in the left pod, next to the timer. Click it to choose which custom prompt post-processes the dictation you are recording; the choice covers that dictation only, and the dot is filled while a prompt is in effect.
• Prompt name — when you pick a prompt from the dot, its name shows for a moment — above the Floating Pill, or in a bubble just below the Dynamic Island, the same way as the microphone name — then fades; the filled dot keeps showing that a prompt is in effect. A prompt applied by an app rule fills the dot silently, without the name. The two names never show at the same time, and opening the picker dismisses them.
• Processing, then the result — animated dots while the audio is transcribed, then Done! or the error message.

Cancelling a dictation

While a dictation is recording, esc cancels it: the audio is thrown away, nothing is transcribed or pasted, and Speakly is immediately ready for the next one. The key is only intercepted while a dictation is actually recording — outside of that, esc behaves normally everywhere. An Agent Mode dictation is the exception: the agent bar has its own esc, which closes the bar instead.

The prompt picker

Clicking the dot opens a list that starts with Default — no post-processing, followed by your custom prompts, with the row in effect ticked. The Floating Pill grows upwards into the list; the Dynamic Island drops it below the notch, and the island itself does not move. Pick a prompt and it applies to the dictation being recorded and to that one only, outranking the rule the app in focus would have chosen; pick Default and post-processing is switched off for this dictation, whatever the app's rule says — it carries the checkmark while no prompt is applied. Picking the ticked prompt again still clears it too. Nothing carries over — the next dictation starts clean, with the app-based rules deciding again. A click outside the list, or esc, closes it, and it does not stay open on its own.

• 0–9 — the digits beside the rows are exactly the keys that pick them: 0 is Default — no post-processing, 1–9 are the prompts in order. Only the first nine prompts are numbered; the rest stay reachable with the arrows or the mouse.
• ↑ ↓ — move the highlight, ⏎ applies it.
• esc — close the picker and change nothing; the recording keeps running.
• Those keys come from Speakly's native key listener, so they work on Windows, and on macOS once Accessibility is granted. Without it the footer of the list reads Click to choose.
• The dot, the picker and its keys are identical on both layouts; only where the list opens differs — upwards from the Floating Pill, downwards below the Dynamic Island's notch.