Context Awareness reads your active app and adapts transcription accuracy, style, and formatting automatically — so emails sound like emails and Slack messages sound like Slack messages.

What it is

Context Awareness identifies the application you're using and adjusts your dictation accordingly. It improves accuracy by detecting names in emails, applies your Style Personalization settings based on the app category, and handles smart formatting in apps like Notion.

Context Awareness is enabled by default.

When to use it

Use this feature when you want to:

• Dictate emails and have Flow automatically recognize recipient names and apply a professional tone

• Switch between apps like Slack and Google Docs without manually adjusting your writing style

• Dictate into Notion without Flow picking up placeholder text like "Heading 1" or "Type something..."

How it works

Overview

Context Awareness reads limited text near your cursor and identifies your active app using accessibility APIs on Mac and UI Automation on Windows. For browser-based apps, Flow identifies the specific website by URL — so Gmail, Google Docs, and other web apps are recognized individually. All context data stays local to your device and is used only during the active dictation session.

Key behaviors

• Improved accuracy: Flow uses names and context visible on screen (such as email recipients) to help the transcription model recognize proper nouns and preserve correct capitalization.

• Style matching: Flow automatically detects which category your active app belongs to (email, work messaging, personal messaging, or other) and applies the corresponding Style Personalization settings you configured during onboarding.

• Conversation context: Flow reads conversation context in messaging apps like Slack and Messages to provide better transcription accuracy.

• Smart formatting in Notion: Flow detects and ignores common placeholder text in Notion fields (such as "To-do", "Heading 1", and "Type something..."), helping dictated text appear in the right place with correct formatting.

• Browser recognition: Chrome, Safari, Arc, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and other browsers are supported. Flow identifies the specific website rather than the browser name.

Privacy protections

• Password fields excluded: Password field contents are never read or included in context data. If you voice-type into a password field, your spoken audio is still processed through Wispr's servers for transcription as normal.

• Privacy Mode: When enabled, no dictation or context data is retained or used for training. Privacy Mode is permanently locked on if you have signed the HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) or if your organization enforces zero data retention (ZDR).

• HIPAA: If your organization requires HIPAA compliance, sign the BAA in Settings → Data and Privacy, which permanently locks Privacy Mode on. Context Awareness can be independently disabled for additional caution.

• Accessibility permissions: On Mac, you must grant accessibility permissions in System Settings for Context Awareness to function. On Windows, no explicit accessibility permissions are required.

FAQs

Limitations and notes

• Context Awareness is available on Mac and Windows. Windows support is more limited — some features may not be fully available yet.

• On Windows, context-aware formatting adjustments are skipped when dictating inside the Flow app itself, and some accessibility tree features available on Mac may not function identically.

• Enterprise organizations can enforce local data deletion policies (auto-delete after 24 hours or never store) separately from ZDR.