The tube
- Click the tube to start or stop recording, the same as the hotkey. The click waits a moment in case it turns into a double-click.
- Double-click it to shrink VoiceKeyboard to a mini tube that floats over other windows; see mini windows.
The tube is dark when nothing is recording. During a recording the heaters glow, and the light grows as you speak.
The Steel hood style has a round screen with a green sound wave. Click the screen to hide or show the wave; that does not affect the recording.
Five tube styles
SETUP → Tube switches the look: Steel hood, Steel guard, Clamps, Magic eye and Porthole. On Magic eye a green eye opens with your voice, in five shapes: Wedge up, Wedge down, Cat's eye, Two bars and Ring. The same page has fine tuning of the light and of how strongly the tube reacts to speech, with a Reset in every block.
The free plan has the Porthole. All five styles and the tuning are part of Pro.
WORDS and TIME SAVED
WORDS shows how many words you dictated, on eight drums. TIME SAVED shows how much typing time that spared you: years, months and days on top, hours, minutes and seconds below.
The toggle on the right switches both counters: up is TODAY, counted from midnight; down is ALL TIME.
Time saved is an estimate. People type about 27 words a minute and speak about 130, so each dictated word saves roughly 1.75 seconds. A thousand words come to a little under half an hour.
Only finished phrases of dictation count; drafts that are rewritten while you speak do not, and neither does FILES. Japanese text has no spaces, so there every two and a half kana or kanji count as one word.
The drum clicks
The drums click as they turn while you speak. SETUP → App → Counters controls it: "Drum clicks while you speak" turns the sound on or off, the volume slider sets how loud (new installs start at 30%), and "Click sound" has three choices: 1 is a recorded ratchet, 2 the same ratchet lower and warmer, 3 a synthesised gear tooth.
Also on this panel
The HOTKEY plate shows the start and stop combination; click it to change it, as described on the hotkey page.