What to expect from Flow: accuracy and known limitations

Wondering why your first words got clipped, why a long dictation cut off, or why one language is less accurate than another? This page separates normal behavior from hardware and platform constraints, and points you to what is worth troubleshooting.

An internet connection is required

Flow transcribes in the cloud, so there is no offline transcription on any platform. If your connection drops mid-dictation, Flow retries automatically, so short blips usually recover. If it still cannot complete, the dictation is saved and a Retry option appears in your history (desktop: for up to 14 days).

• VPNs: Flow is not compatible with most VPNs. If you need one, enable split tunneling and allow wisprflow.ai and its subdomains.

Language accuracy varies by language

Flow supports 100+ languages, but accuracy and formatting quality differ. Language is detected per dictation session, not per word.

• Dedicated formatting: English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Japanese, and Korean. All other languages use general-purpose formatting and remain less reliable than English.

• Highest transcription confidence: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Turkish, Polish, and Catalan.

• Writing Styles: Optimized for English and applied regardless of your dictation language, though the iOS interface labels them English-only. Not available on Android.

• Mixing languages in one dictation: English with Spanish, French, or German works well. English with Chinese or Japanese is less reliable — English words may be transcribed in Chinese characters, or the reverse. For code mixing, select Hinglish explicitly rather than Hindi or English alone.

Session length limits

At the maximum session length, Flow submits what it has rather than discarding it.

How Flow inserts text, and what that affects

On Mac and Windows, Flow pastes through the system clipboard, then restores what you had copied before.

• What is restored: Standard text and image formats. File contents, PDFs, RTFD documents, audio formats, and copied files are not.

• If a paste fails: Flow writes your dictated text to the clipboard so you can paste it manually, and your previous clipboard contents are not restored. If paste has been failing in an app, paste anything important somewhere safe first.

• Clipboard managers: On Mac, dictated text is marked as concealed, so most third-party clipboard managers will not store it in their history. On Windows it is not concealed and may appear.

• Android: Flow inserts text directly into the focused field, using the clipboard only as a fallback when direct insertion fails — you then get an error bubble with a Paste action. Flow never inserts into password, credit-card, numeric, or phone-number fields, and the bubble does not appear in banking apps or password managers.

Where direct paste does not work

• Remote desktops such as Citrix, RDP, VMware Horizon, and Windows 365. Flow cannot be installed inside a virtual desktop and must run on your local machine; context-aware formatting also does not work inside remote sessions.

• Some terminals including WSL, tmux, screen, SSH, and Termius on Windows.

In these cases, use Paste Last Transcript: Ctrl+Cmd+V on Mac or Alt+Shift+Z on Windows.

What you can do with a past dictation on desktop

From your desktop history you can play back the audio or download it as a .wav file (both available for 14 days), copy the transcript, report a problem, undo or redo the AI edit, retry the transcription, and delete the entry.

Keyboard navigation: Cmd/Ctrl+F or / to search, Up/Down or j/k to move between entries, Enter for the row's primary action.

Microphone and audio expectations

• Recording start: Flow discards a small amount of audio at the start of every recording, on every microphone. Pause briefly before you speak to avoid clipped first words.

• Wireless microphones: AirPods and other wireless mics have a variable wake-up delay that can drop your opening words. Built-in and wired USB microphones have none.

• Very short or near-silent audio: Very short clips are skipped without an error, and near-silent input may produce a short spurious phrase instead of real speech.

• Microphone quality: Flow works best with a wired or built-in microphone. Bluetooth earbuds and wired headphone mics score poorly for dictation quality. The built-in Microphone Quiz recommends a mic for your setup.

• Mac clamshell mode: The built-in microphone does not work with the lid closed. Use an external microphone.

• Virtual audio devices: Virtual and loopback inputs (such as those used by noise-cancellation or audio-routing software) can be selected manually from the mic picker in Settings or the Flow bar, but Flow never chooses one automatically, and they do not appear in the ranked microphone preference list or trigger the new-microphone prompt. If a selected one disconnects, Flow falls back to your ranked preferences.

Microphone messages you may see

On Mac and Windows:

• No microphone detected: Open Sound Settings to check your devices.

• Selected microphone is unavailable: The microphone you previously chose has been disconnected.

• Microphone unavailable: Another app is using it or the driver is stuck. Shown only on repeat failures.

• Microphone Permission Required (on Windows: Microphone access is disabled): Flow does not have permission to use the microphone.

• Is your microphone muted? Escalates to Microphone is not working during dictation.

• We couldn't hear you: A dictation over roughly 3 seconds produced no text.

• We didn't hear you clearly: Audio quality was too low to transcribe accurately.

FAQs

Related guides

• Transcription suddenly got worse or feels less accurate

• Missing first words in transcriptions

• Fix "Taking longer than usual" and transcription errors

• Retry failed transcriptions

• Teaching Flow language-specific abbreviations and acronyms