Claude Dictation Hotkey — Design skill for Claude Code

claude-dictation-hotkey

**A keyboard shortcut for the microphone button in the Claude desktop app — on macOS, using Claude's own transcription.**

Hold a key, speak, release. No mouse. No third‑party dictation app.

Everyone who has looked into this concluded it was impossible. It isn't — it just needs one undocumented accessibility flag.

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The problem

The Claude desktop app has a microphone button in the Code tab's input bar. It is **mouse‑click only**. There is no keyboard shortcut, and the usual ways of adding one all fail:

What you try	What happens
/voice	/voice isn't available in this environment. — it's a CLI‑only feature
~/.claude/keybindings.json → voice:pushToTalk	No effect. The keybindings file applies to the terminal CLI, not the desktop app
AppleScript / System Events	Finds nothing. The button isn't in the accessibility tree
Hammerspoon with hs.axuielement	Same — finds nothing
AutoHotkey (Windows) visually locating the icon	Works until you move or resize the window

This has been asked for repeatedly and is still open: [#97929](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/97929) · [#48305](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/48305) · [#59400](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/59400) · [#92402](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/92402) · [#90576](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/90576) · [#96340](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/96340)

The fix

The mic button lives inside an **Electron WebArea**, and Chromium does not expose web content to the macOS accessibility API until something asks it to. Walk the app's accessibility tree cold and you get about **292 nodes — menu bar and window chrome only**. The button genuinely isn't there.

Set one attribute on the application element:

AXUIElementSetAttributeValue(axApp, "AXManualAccessibility" as CFString, kCFBooleanTrue)

and the tree jumps to ro