Context Awareness

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. It's on by default.

When to use it

Use this feature when you want to:

• Dictate emails and have Flow 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 hint text.

How it works in Flow

Overview

Flow reads text near your cursor and sorts your active app into one of four categories: Email, Work messaging, Personal messaging, and Other. Per-dictation context — captured text, extracted names, and counts — is cleared when the dictation ends.

In browsers, Flow identifies the website rather than the browser, so Slack in Chrome is Work messaging and Gmail in Chrome is Email. Google products (Gmail, Docs, Gemini, Calendar, Meet, Drive, Chat, AI Studio, and Colab) are recognized separately; the same service reached via different URLs or as a PWA is merged into one app. System processes and Wispr Flow itself are excluded.

Key behaviors

• Improved accuracy: Flow uses names and context visible on screen, such as email recipients, to recognize proper nouns and preserve capitalization.

• Style matching: Flow applies the Style Personalization settings you configured during onboarding for your active app's category.

• Proper-noun preservation: Mid-sentence lowercasing is skipped when the dictated text starts with a proper noun matching your first or last name, your personal dictionary, your team dictionary, or names visible on screen.

• Conversation context: Other apps benefit from general nearby-text reading.

• Smart formatting in Notion and AI chat apps: In Notion, Flow skips context-aware formatting when surrounding text is very short or looks like placeholder text. In AI chat apps like Claude, Flow ignores placeholder hint text such as "Reply to Claude…" and keyboard shortcut tips.

• Browser recognition: Chrome, Safari, Arc, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Zen Browser, Yandex Browser, Sidekick, and Shift are supported. When a website cannot be identified quickly, Flow falls back to the browser name without specific-site recognition.

• Context-aware formatting: Flow matches casing, spacing, and punctuation to surrounding text. Continuing mid-sentence lowercases the first letter and adds leading spaces. Trailing periods follow your writing style: Formal keeps them, Casual strips them for shorter dictations, Very Casual always strips them. Trailing "!" and "?" are removed only for mid-sentence continuation or when text is selected, and never when the line already has punctuation.

• Persistent context in code editors: Flow remembers file names seen in Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code across dictation sessions. File tagging and special formatting apply to Cursor and Windsurf only; VS Code gets file-name memory only.

Privacy protections

• Context data handling: Context is collected locally and sent to Wispr with each dictation request unless Privacy Mode is on. It includes app info, textbox contents (before, selected, and after the cursor), on-screen text, variable and file names in coding apps, your user identifier within the app, the apps in your current session, a screenshot, and conversation history (participant IDs and message roles/content).

• Password fields excluded: Password field contents are never read or included in context data; your audio is still transcribed as normal. Standard macOS password fields are excluded automatically, but custom or web-based password fields may be read like normal text fields.

• Additional field exclusions: Flow also excludes sensitive and numeric-only fields and browser URL bars, filters out placeholder and hint text, and skips context reading entirely in banking and financial apps and inside Wispr Flow itself.

• Privacy Mode: When enabled, no dictation or context data is retained or used for training. It is permanently locked on if you have signed the HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA), or if your enterprise admin has enforced zero data retention or disabled data sharing.

• Accessibility permissions: On Mac, grant accessibility permissions in System Settings for Context Awareness to function. Windows requires none.

Examples

FAQs

Limitations and notes

• Context Awareness is available on Mac (full), Windows (partial), and iOS (limited to the focused text field). On Windows, conversation context, element descriptions, and IDE-specific handling are Mac-only today, and context-aware formatting is skipped inside the Wispr Flow app window.

• On Mac, accessibility permissions must be granted in System Settings.

• Context reading is skipped for any dictation where it cannot complete quickly, so dictation is never slowed down.

• File tagging in Cursor and Windsurf does not run inside the IDE terminal, when a dictionary substitution was applied to the transcript, or when the IDE File Tagging setting is off. Filenames must include an extension (e.g., file.ts), contain no spaces, and start with a letter — so ".eslintrc" or names starting with digits are not tagged.

• Enterprise organizations can enforce local data deletion policies (auto-delete after 24 hours, or never store) separately from zero data retention, and can set a floor that restricts users to more aggressive settings. With only a floor set, the dropdown stays usable and shows a "restricted by your organization" message; with "Never store" enforced, the setting is locked with a "managed by your organization" tooltip. Related org controls include note-sharing restrictions and department-only snippet sharing.