Dictate

Use your voice to write and edit text in Heidi and across your entire desktop. Press and hold a hotkey to dictate instantly, or use the microphone icon if you prefer to manually start and stop dictation.

Dictate turns your voice into text instantly — so you can write notes, ask questions, fill in forms, and draft documents without touching the keyboard. It works across Heidi and, with the Desktop App, in any app on your computer.

Whether you're writing in your EHR, drafting an email, or adding to your clinical notes, dictation lets you stay focused on your patient while Heidi handles the typing.

Dictate supports 90+ languages.

Dictate uses a "hotkey" to activate — a key you press to trigger an action without clicking through menus. In Heidi, holding the Dictate hotkey turns your microphone on; releasing it sends the transcribed text to wherever your cursor is.

For the desktop app, the hotkeys are:

You can enable or disable Dictate via Settings → Defaults → Dictate using the Dictate with a shortcut toggle. This setting is available across both the desktop and web browser apps.

To set your preferred dictation language, go to Settings → Defaults → Dictate and choose your language from the dedicated dictation language setting.

To change your hotkey shortcut, head to the same screen and tap Change shortcut.

There are two ways to dictate:

With the Heidi Desktop App, you can dictate beyond Heidi - directly into your EHR, Word, Outlook, a browser, or any other app with a text field. Heidi runs in the background and transcribes your speech wherever your cursor is placed.

The system hotkeys are Fn on Mac, or Ctrl (right side) on Windows.

You can also dictate ‘hands-free’ with the Desktop App, by double-tapping the hotkey, speaking as required, then pressing the hotkey once more to stop. If you clicked into a text field before starting, your text appears there. Otherwise, it's copied to your clipboard, ready to paste. Hands-free mode means you don't have to hold the hotkey down, which is useful for longer dictations.

Dictate connects with other parts of Heidi and adapts to your context as you work. Some features let you configure how Dictate behaves per app - like setting a writing style for your EHR, emails, or messages. Others draw on features you may already use in Heidi, like Snippets, and become available in Dictate without any extra steps.

To launch Dictate settings, click the Dictate icon in the left-hand navigation bar.

History keeps a record of your past dictations so you can review or reference them later. From the main Dictate settings screen, you can:

To toggle History on or off, in the Dictate settings area, select Settings in the top-right corner and set the toggle for Log my dictations to off.

Speak a short trigger, and Heidi expands it into a full block of text using the Snippets you've set up in Heidi.

If your Snippets are already configured, there's nothing new to set up - anything you've already built is immediately available when you dictate.

To create new Snippets from scratch, head into Dictate > Snippets, and click + Create.

Enter your Trigger phrase - a short phrase you wouldn't normally say mid-dictation. Then, in the Content section, outline the text to be returned during the dictation.

Snippets are shared across Dictate and Memory - anything you create in one place is available in the other.

To find out more about Snippets, see the Snippets section of our Memory article.

Heidi detects which app you're dictating into and adapts the output automatically, based on your Dictate settings. There are three application categories:

Within those categories, you can select one of three tones for Dictate to follow:

While dictating, you can speak punctuation and formatting out loud - Heidi applies it as you go, so you never need to touch the keyboard.

Below is the full list of supported commands:

Use Dictate anywhere you can type in Heidi — including your clinical notes, Ask Heidi, and the template editor.

The web hotkey key label varies depending on your keyboard layout — see Web hotkeys by region below to find yours.

If no text field is selected when you dictate, Heidi shows a clipboard with your transcribed text so you can copy and paste it wherever you need.

Heidi detects your keyboard type automatically. Find your region in the table below to confirm which key to press. Image examples follow after the table.

Most dictation issues are related to microphone access and can be fixed quickly.

If issues persist, please contact our Support team whom will be able to assist.

On Mac, the fn key can be assigned to open the Emoji & Symbols window at the system level, which conflicts with Heidi's Dictate hotkey.

To fix this, go to System Settings → Keyboard, then set "Press 🌐 key to" to Do Nothing. This frees up the fn key so Heidi can use it as intended.