Turn Off The Dictation Hotkey | Chaos and Penguins

I have a habit where I’m about to type a control key (e.g. control-c), I’ll hit the control key twice. I don’t know why I do this, and I’m not sure why it’s only the control key, but on Mac, this has the unwanted side-effect of popping up a prompt to enable dictation. (If I had dictation enabled, I suspect it would start transcribing my speech, which might be even worse.)

Macintosh dialog box asking, "Do you want to enable Dictation."

To turn this off:

Go to system preferences and scroll down to “Keyboard.”

Macintosh preferences dialog with the "Keyboard" pane active.

At the bottom of the keyboard pane, is the “Shortcut” label. This shows the current hotkey for activating dictation. I really don’t want this hotkey, but there doesn’t seem to be an option to not have one, so I’ll choose the microphone and hope it doesn’t start transcribing every random conversation near the MacBook.

List of dictation hotkey options: "Press Microphone," "Press Control Key Twice," "Press Globe Twice," "Press Right Command Key Twice," "Press Left Command Key Twice," "Press Either Command Key Twice," "Customize..."

(Cover image generated by AI via bing.com/create.)