Nothing happened when I pressed both Shift keys
Accessibility is almost certainly off. YapScribe needs it to notice the chord at all — see Permissions. Turn it on in System Settings and it works immediately; there is no relaunch.
If you were in a password field, that is deliberate: the overlay says “That field is secure — YapScribe did not record.”
The text went to my clipboard, or to the wrong app
YapScribe types into whatever was focused when the transcription finished. If it could not find a text field at all, the words go to your clipboard rather than being dropped, and the overlay says why and shows a Paste button.
The usual cause of both is switching apps mid-dictation: “You switched apps while YapScribe was transcribing, so the text is on your clipboard.” If the words did land somewhere wrong, ⌘Z takes them back — the text arrives as a single paste, so one undo covers all of it.
The result box sits there for a few seconds
That is on purpose, and it is the most useful few seconds in the app. The finished text lingers for five seconds in an editable field. Fix the one word it got wrong and press Return, and YapScribe learns the correction — the best signal it gets, and it works in every app.
Click into the field and the countdown stops, because editing is real work and should not be interrupted. Press Escape and it goes away at once, from any state.
It mishears me when I speak quietly
Quiet speech gets its levels fixed before the model hears it, on your Mac, with nothing to switch on — so whispering in a shared office works. Normal speech is left at the level you spoke it. There is no whisper mode to turn on.
What it will not do is pretend: if your speech stands barely above the room — a loud café, a fan by the microphone — gain cannot separate the two, and the recording goes to the model as it came in.
YapScribe crashed and I lost what I was saying
It should not have. While you speak, YapScribe writes what it has heard so far to a small file on your Mac, and writes it again in full the moment the speech model finishes — before polishing and insertion. If the app is killed in between, the next launch offers you that text to view and copy.
The draft is deleted the instant your words land, so one waiting at launch means exactly one thing: a dictation that never reached you. It holds text only — no audio, nothing read off your screen — and a dictation that began in a password field never writes one.
The text arrived but nothing was polished
The overlay says so, with the reason — a key with a typo in it, a provider that refused, cloud words that ran out. Your words are there and your wordlist has been applied to them; what is missing is the tidying.
It is said out loud on purpose: the silent version is plausible text on every dictation, never punctuated, with nothing saying why.
Saying “scratch that” did nothing
Correcting yourself as you speak does work. Say “book it for Tuesday, scratch that, Wednesday” and what came before the phrase is dropped — “forget that” does the same, and so does an ordinary “no wait” — the polishing step reading what you meant.
Said on its own, as the whole utterance, “scratch that” takes the last dictation back out. Three things have to hold: within 60 seconds, the same field, the same app. A different field is not. And if you typed something yourself in between, be warned: the undo takes back the most recent thing in that field, which in many apps is your typing, not the dictation. Otherwise the words are typed as you said them — which is why they may appear in your document.
Nothing happens in a password field
By design — see Permissions for the two cases.
Write to us
If none of this helps, email support@yapscribe.com.
The quickest way is Contact Support… in the YapScribe menu in your menu bar. It opens a new email to that address in your mail app, with the YapScribe version, its build number and your macOS version already in the subject line — the three things we would ask first. Nothing is attached and nothing is collected: you see the whole email, and you are the one who sends it.
Tell us what you were doing, which app you were dictating into, and what the overlay said, if it said anything.
If we ask for a crash report
YapScribe has no crash reporter of its own and sends nothing when it crashes, so we only see a crash report if you send us one. macOS keeps one on your Mac each time an app crashes:
- Open Console, in Applications › Utilities.
- Choose Crash Reports in the sidebar, and pick the newest one whose name starts with YapScribe.
The same files are in Finder: choose Go › Go to Folder…, type
~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports, and look for a name that starts with
YapScribe and ends in .ips. Attach it to your email. It is a text file, so
you can read it before you send it.