Setting up Saywind, and fixing what goes wrong

What you need

A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Intel Macs aren’t supported. You’ll also need room for the speech model, about 630 MB.

Installing

Open the disk image and drag Saywind onto the Applications folder beside it. Open Saywind from Applications, and when macOS asks whether to open an app downloaded from the internet, choose Open.

The first time you open it

After the welcome, Saywind shows a step about its licence. You don’t need a key to start: choose Continue, or Enter Licence Key… if you’ve bought one.

Then it asks for two permissions: the microphone, so it can hear you, and Accessibility, so it can notice your dictation key and paste for you. On a new Mac its speech model, about 630 MB, starts downloading as soon as Saywind opens, and downloads only once. A small word-spotting model, about 100 MB, follows the first time your Dictionary has a word.

Your first dictation

Click into a text box, hold your dictation key, speak and let go. Your words land wherever your cursor is. Press Escape to cancel. To keep listening hands-free, double-tap the key, then tap it again to stop.

To see or change the key, open Saywind’s Settings from its menu bar icon, then General › Shortcut. The features page says more about what Saywind does.

When something’s not right

What you see	What to do
Nothing is pasted.	Open Settings › Permissions. The microphone and Accessibility should both be allowed, and the speech model ready. If Accessibility is already on in System Settings but Saywind still says it isn’t allowed, select Saywind in the Accessibility list there, remove it with the minus button, then add it again.
Nothing happens after you restart your Mac.	Saywind may not be running. Open it from Applications, then turn on “Open at login” in Settings › System.
A note says “No audio detected”.	Saywind can’t hear that microphone. Choose another from the note, or in Settings › General › Microphone. The microphones guide has more.
Nothing appears in a password field.	Saywind doesn’t paste into password fields. Your text waits on the clipboard instead, so you can paste it yourself.
A word keeps coming out wrong.	Correct it where it landed, within a minute: Saywind learns names and jargon from your fixes. Or add it to the Dictionary, with how it sounds. In terminals, some code editors and long documents, or after a long dictation, use Fix Last Dictation… from Saywind’s menu bar icon, or Fix a Word… in History.
Something else opens when you press your dictation key.	Open Settings › Permissions and follow the step shown there.
Changes of mind aren’t untangled.	Smart clean-up does that, on macOS 26 or later with Apple Intelligence on. Check its switch in Settings › Writing: if it’s on but can’t run, the line under it says why. With the switch on, simple corrections like “at 2, sorry, 3” are fixed on every Mac.
Hands-free stopped by itself.	It stops after 20 minutes and pastes what you said. Double-tap again to carry on.

Removing Saywind

If you’ve added a licence key, first choose Remove from This Mac… in Settings › About, so another Mac can use the key. Then quit Saywind from its menu bar icon and drag it from Applications to the Bin. To remove what it keeps too, see how to delete your data.

Still stuck?

Use the feedback form, or email hello@saywind.com.