Context Awareness

Context Awareness reads your active app and adapts transcription accuracy and formatting automatically, so emails sound like emails and Slack messages sound like Slack messages. It's on by default.

How it works in Flow

Flow reads text near your cursor and sorts your active app into one of four categories: Email, Work messaging, Personal messaging, and Other. 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, and one service reached by different URLs or as a web app counts as 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.

• Context-aware formatting: Flow matches casing and punctuation to surrounding text, unless your text starts with a proper noun matching your first or last name, your personal or team dictionary, or a name on screen. Trailing "!" and "?" are removed only for mid-sentence continuation or when text is selected, and never when the line already has punctuation. On Mac and Windows this matching happens on your device, and it also runs when Context Awareness is off.

• Emoji and closing quotes: Text ending in an emoji or closing quotation mark continues the same sentence, so your next dictation stays lowercase and a space is added where needed — "We had fun 😀" followed by "and then we left". This includes emoji and images inserted inline in rich-text editors such as Slack, Gmail, Notion, Discord, and Linear. Punctuation emoji (‼️ ⁉️ ❗ ❕ ❓ ❔), text ending in a period, and a quotation mark that opens a quote (such as (" or said:") start a new capitalized sentence instead. Casing after an @mention is unaffected, and Chinese and Japanese text gets no extra space.

• Browser recognition: Chrome, Safari, Arc, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Zen Browser, Yandex Browser, Sidekick, and Shift are supported. Flow identifies the site from the browser's address bar and tabs, so switching into a browser is recognized promptly even on very large pages; when a site can't be identified quickly, Flow falls back to the browser name without specific-site recognition. Switching away to another app is always picked up right away.

• App-specific handling: Missive counts as Email in the browser and in the Mac desktop app, so your chosen Email style and email formatting (greetings, sign-offs, line breaks) apply; the Missive desktop app on Windows is treated as Other. File tagging and special formatting apply to Cursor and Windsurf only.

• When cues don't apply: Context reading is skipped for any dictation where it cannot complete quickly, so dictation is never slowed down. On Mac, a selection spanning two separate blocks of text in apps such as Arc, Chrome, or Slack counts as no readable context — your dictation still completes, but casing and spacing cues may not apply. On Windows, a text box showing only its placeholder or label (such as the "Type a message" composer in Microsoft Teams) is treated as empty, so your first word is capitalized and no leading space is added; existing text is never deleted.

Privacy protections

• What context includes: When Context Awareness is on, context can accompany your dictation: 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, and the apps in your current session. Flow works from text and does not take screenshots. Captured text, extracted names, and counts for a dictation are cleared when that dictation ends.

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

• Other exclusions: Flow 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.

• iPhone: The keyboard sends the text before and after your cursor, any selected text, and the app name with each dictation. There's no Context Awareness switch on iPhone.

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

• Separate from other privacy settings: Turning off Improve the model for everyone (on by default for Free and Pro, off for Enterprise) does not turn off Context Awareness or Dictation Cloud Storage. Check each setting separately.

Examples

FAQs