Calls and dictation

There are three ways to use your voice in Hotline:

Dictation turns what you say into words in the message box, for you to read before you send them.
A call to a teammate is a spoken conversation with one teammate. It is the same conversation as the chat, so the teammate remembers the call and everything it does on the call appears in the chat.
A call to the desk is a spoken conversation with the whole room. An assistant answers and hands work to teammates by name.

Voice needs no key of its own. It uses the providers you have already connected, a speech model the desk downloads, or, on a Mac, the Mac’s own speech recognition.

Something to hear you

Hotline needs something that turns speech into words. Open Settings → Providers → Use for → Transcription and choose Set up. There are three kinds:

On this Mac. Apple’s on-device recognition. It is free and private, and nothing you say leaves the Mac. The language model downloads once.

On the desk. Speech models Hotline downloads once and runs itself, on macOS, Windows, Linux or a server. They are free and private, and they cost nothing against a budget.

Model	Good for	Download
Parakeet	25 European languages, the most accurate	487 MB
Whisper	99 languages, slower	564 MB
Parakeet English	English, small and quick	108 MB
Moonshine	English	251 MB

Each one shows its download progress and can be cancelled or removed. Once a model is installed, the desk hears you with it first, from every device that talks to this desk.

A provider you connected, such as OpenAI, Google, Groq, Mistral, OpenRouter or xAI. These hear you on calls only, are paid by the request, and count against your Voice budget. An xAI sign-in with SuperGrok or X Premium+ can hear and speak too, under your subscription rather than by the request. It is never picked automatically: choose it yourself under Transcription or Voice.

Dictation needs one of the first two: the Mac’s own recognition or a speech model on the desk.

Words to listen for, under Transcription, lists names the Parakeet models should expect. They already know your teammates’ names, Hotline, and the providers you use, so they hear “Mack” rather than “Mac”. Add anything else, such as a project name.

To be spoken to on a call, the desk also needs a provider that can speak: the Voice row under Use for. Without one, a call can still hear you, but it has no voice.

Dictate

With an empty message box, the key at its right is a microphone (Dictate).

Tap it to start, and tap again to stop.
Hold it to talk for as long as you hold it down.

Your words fill in as you speak. Press Enter to stop and Esc to cancel and put the box back the way it was. Nothing is sent until you send it.

Settings → General → Shortcuts has a Dictate shortcut that works from any app (Ctrl + Option + H by default), and After dictating:

Don’t send (the default) leaves the words in the box.
Send counts down a second and a half once you stop dictating, then sends. The countdown starts only if it heard at least two characters besides spaces. Press Esc, type in the box or click it to call the send off and keep the words; Enter sends at once.

If the microphone is missing, busy or not allowed, the box says which. On a Mac, allow Hotline under Speech Recognition and Microphone in System Settings → Privacy & Security.

If nothing can hear you yet, the empty box shows the call key instead of the microphone.

Call a teammate

Press the phone key in the band at the top of the conversation (Call and the teammate’s name). If dictation is not set up, the key in an empty message box (Talk to and the teammate’s name) starts a call too.

A live call opens with a voice that speaks as the teammate, in the voice set on its card. It answers conversation and looks things up itself, with the tools the teammate is allowed; anything that changes code goes to the teammate’s own agent and model, in the chapter you are in, with the same folders, tools and permissions as when you type to it. Afterwards the conversation holds that request and one short summary of the call, in the teammate’s words, so a typed follow-up carries on from it.

The teammate answers twice: once in a short reply written to be heard, and once in the full reply written to be read, with the code, tables and links. The chat shows the full reply as an ordinary message. A quiet line above the full reply shows what was said on the call; press it to read it.
While the teammate works, the call plays a soft blip-blip and keeps listening. You do not need to tap anything to talk: speak, and what you say goes into the work it already has open.
Talking while it speaks cuts it off. That stops the speech, not the work.
Anything that needs your approval still arrives as a card in the conversation. A call never takes a spoken yes as an approval.

The call floats as a card in the window’s bottom corner, with Hold, Hang up, and the teammate’s mark, which you press to cut in. Its clock counts only the time you were talking, so time on hold does not count. After ten quiet minutes, the call ends by itself.

When it ends, the conversation keeps one quiet line for the call, such as “Call · 4 min · Hung up”. That line opens what was said. Teammates can find earlier calls when they search their own conversations.

A teammate can have a voice of its own. Choose it in the Voice row of its pane. Otherwise it speaks in the desk’s voice.

Call the desk

The phone in the window’s title bar (Talk to the desk) calls the whole room. An assistant answers in a sentence or two, hands work to your teammates by name, and tells you when it lands. Use it when you want to start several things at once without opening each conversation.

Pick the model that answers in Settings → Providers → Use for → Call assistant. The same assistant also rewrites a teammate’s reply for speech when the teammate wrote only the full version. A call to the desk is not kept as a thread; the work it hands out lands in each teammate’s conversation.

Settings → General → Shortcuts has Call your agent and Call the desk, which work from any app. Both are off until you give them a key. Pressing either during a call hangs up.

What it costs

Speech from a provider you pay is counted against the Voice budget, and the call assistant’s replies against the Chat budget. See Budgets. A call that runs on the Mac’s own recognition, on a desk model, or on a subscription is never ended by a spent budget. A call that a spent budget refuses names the budget.

From your phone

Only the desk’s owner can make calls, from the desktop app or from Hotline for iPhone. The iPhone app is in beta, and not every part of calling is in it yet. See Hotline on your phone.