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Dictation touches more than the text field you are typing into. These settings decide what happens to your music, your clipboard, and your screen while a recording is running.

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System audio while you dictate

Controlling system audio requires Pro. On the free plan only Do nothing is selectable; the other two cards carry a Pro badge.
Settings > Recording > When recording starts is a three-way choice, shown as picture cards. It is available on macOS and Windows.
This setting governs dictation only. It is not applied when you record a meeting note, because a meeting needs the other participants to stay audible. See Meeting Notes recording for what Vowen does with audio during a meeting.
Mute works on the output device. Whatever was playing keeps playing, you just cannot hear it, and the volume is put back when the recording ends. Pause talks to the media session itself, so the track stops where it was and picks up from the same point afterwards.

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When Pause cannot pause

Not every audible app exposes a media session Vowen can drive. If you have chosen Pause and something is making noise that refuses the pause command, Vowen falls back to muting the output for that recording, so you still get a quiet microphone.
The restore step never looks at your setting. It asks what was actually done and undoes exactly that, so a recording that fell back to muting is unmuted, not “resumed”. This is why a Pause recording sometimes restores your volume rather than your playback position.
On macOS both pausing and output control are handled by one native helper, which keeps the whole operation atomic. On Windows the two halves are composed separately, and Vowen writes a marker file before muting. If the app exits mid-recording while the system is muted, the next launch finds that marker and unmutes for you.
The underlying entitlement is called muteBackgroundAudio, which is what you will see referenced in plan comparisons. It covers Pause as well as Mute.

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Real-time transcription preview

Real-time preview requires Pro.
Settings > Recording > Real-time transcription preview shows a live preview of your transcription below the recording indicator while you are still speaking. The toggle is greyed out, with the message “Configure a real-time capable model to use this feature”, unless your active speech model can stream. Streaming-capable models are:
Nova 2 and Nova 3 (Deepgram), Scribe v2 (ElevenLabs), Universal-3.5 Pro (AssemblyAI), Voxtral Mini (Mistral), Saaras v3 (Sarvam AI), Real-Time STT (Soniox), Aurora (xAI), Ink 2 (Cartesia), Speechmatics, OpenAI, and Google Gemini.A cloud model only counts as streaming-capable once it is actually configured. Selecting it without saving credentials leaves the toggle greyed out.
Parakeet V3 and Parakeet V2, and Nemotron EN and Nemotron Multilingual.Local streaming preview is macOS only. On Windows, Parakeet cannot drive the live preview, so the toggle stays greyed out for local models there.Nemotron streams natively and its partial results already carry punctuation and capitalisation, so its preview reads as finished text rather than a running lowercase stream.
This is not the same setting as the meeting notes preview. Show real-time transcription preview in the Notes settings, under Recording Defaults, streams live text into the meeting notes page while a meeting is being recorded. It is Pro, and it follows the transcription model chosen for meetings rather than your dictation model. Turning one on does not turn the other on.

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Silence and voice detection

These two controls live in Settings > Experimental, not Settings > Recording.
Cloud speech models sometimes invent text from room noise: fans, air conditioning, a keyboard. Enhanced silence detection raises the silence threshold applied before audio is sent to a cloud model, so quiet noise is treated as silence instead of speech. Turn it on if you get empty or hallucinated transcriptions when you were not speaking. Switching it on reveals a second row, Sensitivity, a slider from 1x to 5x with a default of 2x. It multiplies the base threshold. At 2x, audio has to be twice as loud as the measured baseline before it counts as speech.
  • Increase it if phantom transcriptions still get through.
  • Decrease it if real speech starts getting skipped.
This affects cloud models only. Local models run their own voice detection.

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Restore clipboard after paste

Settings > General > Restore clipboard after paste puts your original clipboard contents back after a transcription is pasted, so dictating does not cost you whatever you had copied.
This is on by default. There is nothing to switch on.

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Keeping dictations out of clipboard history

Vowen pastes by putting text on the clipboard, so clipboard managers such as Maccy, Raycast, or Ditto would otherwise record every dictation you make. They do not, because Vowen marks the clipboard entry as transient. Settings > Developer > Allow Dictations in Clipboard History is the switch that changes this, and it is off by default. Leave it off to keep dictations out of your clipboard history. Turn it on if you would rather be able to fish an old dictation back out of your clipboard manager.
Vowen keeps its own record of your dictations in the Voice Log, so turning this on is rarely necessary just to recover text.