Dictation worked for weeks. Then macOS installed an update, and now recording still runs — you see the waveform, the transcript appears in Sprecho's history — but nothing is typed into your document. Or the dictation key does nothing at all.
Nothing on your side broke. macOS re-validated its Accessibility list during the update and quietly stopped honouring Sprecho's entry, even though the entry is still visible with its switch on. That is what you are looking at, and it takes about a minute to fix.
Try this first
- Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.
- Find Sprecho in the list and select it.
- Click the – (minus) button to remove it. Confirm if macOS asks.
- Click + (plus), navigate to Applications, choose Sprecho, and make sure its switch is on.
- Quit Sprecho completely — right-click the menu-bar icon and choose Quit, not just close the window — and open it again.
Step 5 is not optional. macOS hands the Accessibility permission to a process when that process launches. A running app keeps whatever answer it got at startup, so a permission granted mid-session does nothing until the next launch.
Why toggling the switch off and on is not enough
The entry in the list is a record of a specific app binary at a specific path. After a system upgrade that record can be stale — pointing at something macOS no longer accepts — while the interface still shows a name and a green switch. Flipping the switch rewrites the state of a record that is already being ignored.
Removing the entry deletes the record. Adding Sprecho again creates a fresh one against the app as it exists now, which is why the remove-and-re-add sequence works when toggling does not.
The dictation key does nothing after the update
The same permission covers two different things: typing text into other apps,
and watching for your dictation key while Sprecho is in the background. If the
Accessibility entry is stale, both stop — so an unresponsive fn key is the
same problem, not a second one.
Work through the five steps above. If the key still does nothing afterwards, check under Settings → General → Keyboard Shortcuts that the shortcut you expect is still the one that is set.
The microphone permission can be reset too
Less often, an update also clears the microphone grant. If recording produces no waveform at all, open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and confirm Sprecho is switched on there as well. Microphone not working on macOS covers that side in detail.
After a Mac migration or a restore from backup
Migration Assistant and Time Machine restores produce the same symptom for the same reason: the app that arrived on the new Mac is not the app the permission record was written for. The fix is identical — remove, re-add, restart.
If Sprecho was copied rather than installed, drag it to Applications properly first, then grant the permission. An app running from Downloads or from a mounted disk image can be denied again on the next launch.
Symptom → cause
| What you see | What it usually is |
|---|---|
| Recording works, transcript exists, nothing is typed | The Accessibility entry was reset by the update |
| The dictation key does nothing at all | Same stale Accessibility entry — it also covers key monitoring |
| Sprecho is listed and switched on, but still cannot type | A stale record: remove it and add it again rather than toggling |
| It types once and never again | Sprecho was not restarted after the permission was re-granted |
| No waveform when you speak | The microphone grant was reset as well |
Still stuck?
If you have removed the entry, added Sprecho again and restarted the app, and text still does not appear, No text is inserted into my app covers the causes that are not about permissions at all — focus loss, password fields and apps that refuse simulated input.
Otherwise contact support with your macOS version and your Sprecho version from Settings → System → Updates.