LockedIn Flow

VS Reliability

Wispr Flow not working?Check both sides of the connection.

A freeze mid-sentence. “You’re offline” on a stable connection. A dictation that never arrived. These can come from your Mac, or from the network and cloud-service path. Here’s how to tell which.

Updated October 2026Wispr Flow facts reviewed September 26, 20264 min read

Fig. 01, every link in the dictation path. LockedIn Flow: microphone, capture in memory, speech recognition, local cleanup, save to History and one paste at the cursor, all on the Mac, and the app makes no network requests of its own. Wispr Flow, as its documentation describes it: an internet connection is required, the audio is transcribed in its cloud, and the text returns to the cursor. Each network link can fail on its own.

How a failed dictation shows up

  • A freeze mid-sentence: the bar stops, the words are gone.
  • “Offline” errors while every other app is online.
  • Dictations that finish, disappear, and can’t be recovered.
  • Sign-in problems that leave you unable to dictate at all.

None of these proves a single cause. Permissions, the input device, app bugs and the destination field can fail on their own, network or not. A cloud transcription product also depends on its network and service path.

The extra dependencies in cloud dictation

Wispr Flow’s accuracy and limitations guide states that an internet connection is required and that dictation is transcribed in the cloud. That adds a round-trip before text appears, the dashed links in Fig. 01:

  1. Upload. Your audio goes up, queuing behind whatever else is on your connection.
  2. Cloud. The service transcribes the audio.
  3. Return. The text comes back across the network.

Any one of them can delay or block the result. That is a normal trade-off of cloud transcription, not proof of which link failed in a given incident.

What local processing removes, and what it doesn’t

LockedIn Flow runs the whole pipeline on your Apple silicon Mac, on macOS 15 or later. Parakeet TDT v3 recognizes speech on the Apple Neural Engine and cleanup uses local rules. No upload, no sign-in, no round-trip. Once the speech model is installed, dictation needs no network connection.

That takes the transcription service out of the critical path. Microphone routing, permissions, the speech model, focus and text delivery still matter, as they do for any dictation app. The checks at the end of this page cover them.

History keeps the text

LockedIn Flow saves every transcript to History before it pastes, and no paste result deletes it.

Recovery — what happens when a paste doesn’t landSaved first
Saved
Before it’s typed. A missed paste never costs you the words.
Pasted
Once, never retried. Text is never inserted twice.
Recover
Copy or re-insert any recent dictation from History or the menu bar.
No access
No Accessibility? Your words are copied for you to paste.
Failed
Retry without re-recording. A failed recording is held in memory for Retry, never written to disk.

History lives in memory until you quit, by default. Keep it longer if you like; what you keep is encrypted on the Mac.

When it actually is your Mac

Some dictation problems are local. These four checks are good first steps for LockedIn Flow or any other Mac dictation app.

  1. Microphone permission. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone. The app must be listed and turned on.
  2. Input device. System Settings → Sound → Input. Confirm the right mic is selected and the level moves when you talk.
  3. Accessibility permission. macOS requires it before one app can paste into another. Without it, LockedIn Flow copies each transcript for you to paste. If text stops appearing at the cursor, turn the permission off and on again.
  4. Restart the app after changing permissions or the selected input, so it picks up the current state.
SourcesCloud-processing and platform claims reviewed against Wispr Flow’s official accuracy and limitations and system requirements documentation on September 26, 2026. Tell us if something changes.

MIT Free under the MIT License

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