Mac Dictation Not Working in Medium? 10 Fixes That Work

Short answer: If Mac dictation is not working in Medium, open the story in the editor and click in the body until a cursor blinks, then start dictation. Medium on a Mac is a website with no voice typing of its own, and a published story is read-only until you choose Edit.

You have a story half written in your head and a Medium draft open in a browser tab. Saying it would be much quicker than typing it. You press your dictation shortcut, talk for a minute, and nothing appears. Or the whole first paragraph turns into the title. Or your opening sentence becomes a numbered list, someone you have never met gets mentioned, or the section you dictated yesterday is nowhere to be found today.

Four facts about Medium on a Mac explain almost all of it. First, Medium on a Mac is a website with no voice typing of its own, so dictation comes from macOS or from a dictation app, and both deliver text to whatever has keyboard focus, exactly as if you had typed it. Second, a story only accepts text while it is open in the editor. A published story is a page for reading until you choose to edit it. Third, the editor is not one big box. The first line is the title, and image captions, the publish panel and the response box under a story are all separate fields. Fourth, the editor reacts to certain characters as they arrive and turns them into lists, code blocks and mentions.

So most Medium dictation problems on a Mac are about where the cursor was when you spoke and what the editor did with the characters, not about your microphone. This guide works through every cause in order, most common first. If dictation is failing in every app on your Mac and not only in Medium, start with our complete guide to Mac dictation not working instead. Medium changes its design from time to time, so exact button names and positions may differ a little from what you see on your screen.

First, which Medium page are you on?

At the time of writing, Medium has no dedicated app for the Mac, so writing on a Mac happens in a browser. That still leaves several different pages, and only some of them take text.

• The editor. You reach it from Write for a new story, or by opening a draft from your stories list. It shows a title line, the body below it, and a save status near the top of the page. This is the only place where a story can be dictated.
• A published story. It looks almost the same as the editor, but it is the reading view. Clicking in a paragraph selects text. It never gives you a typing cursor, even when the story is your own.
• Your stories list. A list of drafts and published stories. It is a set of links, not a place to write.
• The publish panel. It appears when you click Publish, with short fields for a preview title, a preview subtitle and topics.
• The responses panel. It opens beside a story and holds the box where you reply to the writer.
• Profile and publication settings. Your bio, a publication's description and similar pages each have small fields of their own.
• An installed web app. Safari and Chrome can install a site as a window of its own with an icon in the Dock. It looks like a Mac app, but it is the same website, and macOS treats it as a separate app from your browser.

Each browser, browser profile and installed web app also keeps its own sign-in, so you can be signed in to one Medium account in Safari and another in Chrome without noticing. Knowing which page and which account you are in settles a good share of the confusion below.

How dictation reaches Medium on a Mac

Apple dictation is built into macOS. You start it with the dictation shortcut, usually the microphone key or whichever shortcut is set in System Settings under Keyboard, or from Edit, then Start Dictation in your browser's menu bar. It sends its text to whichever field has keyboard focus. Medium does not need microphone permission for that, because it is your Mac that is listening, not the web page.

Menu bar dictation apps, including ours, look much the same from Medium's side. They put text at your cursor, and many of them deliver it the way a paste does. They need their own Microphone permission, plus Accessibility permission to put text into other apps, under System Settings, then Privacy & Security. Neither Medium nor your browser needs anything extra, and there is no extension to install.

Medium itself adds nothing to this. The editor has no microphone button, and nothing on the page listens to you. Where a story shows a Listen button, that button plays the story aloud. It is playback, and it has nothing to do with writing.

That leaves one rule to remember: dictated text goes to whatever has focus, and Medium treats it exactly like typing. A sentence in the body is part of your story. The same sentence on the first line is your title. In a caption it is a caption, and in the topic field of the publish panel it is a search for a topic that does not exist.

The 30-second TextEdit test

Before you change anything, open TextEdit, create a blank document, start dictation and say a sentence. Then go to Medium, click Write to open a new story you can throw away, click on the line below the title so the cursor blinks there, and dictate the same sentence.

• If nothing appears in TextEdit either, the problem is dictation on your Mac, not Medium. Go to fix 10.
• If TextEdit works but nothing appears in Medium, go to fixes 1 and 2.
• If your words became the title, go to fix 2.
• If your words landed in a caption, a search field or a small pop-up box, go to fix 3.
• If text that was already there disappeared when you spoke, go to fix 4.
• If your sentence turned into a list, a block of code or a mention, go to fix 5.
• If line breaks ended up in the wrong places, go to fix 6.
• If the trouble was in the publish panel or in a response, go to fix 7.
• If your words were there and are gone now, go to fix 8.
• If words doubled, went missing or the cursor jumped while you spoke, go to fix 9.

Command-Z works in Medium's editor. If a paragraph lands somewhere it should not, undo it before you try to repair it by hand.

The 10 fixes, in order

1. Open the story in the editor, not the reading view

A published story on Medium is a page for reading. Click in one of its paragraphs and Medium selects text, and may offer a small menu for highlighting or responding. It does not give you a cursor, so dictated text has nowhere to go. This catches writers who open their own story from their profile, see their own words, and start talking.

What to do:

• For a new story, click Write.
• For a draft, open your stories list, find it under your drafts, and open it from there. Drafts open in the editor.
• For a story that is already published, open the menu on the story and choose Edit story.
• Check for the signs of the editor before you speak: a save status near the top of the page, and a Publish button, or Save and publish on a story that is already live.
• If Medium sends you to a sign-in page instead, your session has ended, or this browser is signed in to a different account. Sign in and open the story again.

One more thing belongs here. Changes to a published story are not live until you click Save and publish. If you dictated a correction and readers still see the old sentence, dictation worked. The story was simply not republished.

2. Click in the body until the cursor blinks, and mind the title

A new story opens with the cursor on the first line, and the first line is the title. Everything you dictate before you move the cursor becomes the title, in large type, however long it runs. If your whole opening paragraph came out as one enormous headline, this is why.

The body is the line below the title, showing a faint placeholder until you type in it. It accepts text only while the cursor is blinking inside it. Plenty of ordinary actions take the cursor out: clicking an image, opening the plus menu at the start of an empty line, clicking in the margin or on the bar at the top of the page, or answering a notification from another site. Afterwards the story looks just as it did before, but the editor no longer has focus.

What to do:

• Click at the exact place where you want the words, look for the blinking cursor, and only then start dictation.
• If the title swallowed a paragraph, select it, cut it with Command-X, click in the body and paste. Then type a short title.
• If you use an installed web app or several browser windows, make sure the Medium window is the front one. Dictation goes to the front window, not to the one you happen to be looking at on a second screen.
• If the cursor is blinking in the body and dictated text still does not arrive, go to fixes 9 and 10.

3. Keep your words out of the small fields

An editor page has several places that accept typing and are not the story. Each one is easy to leave the cursor in.

• The caption under an image. Click an image and a caption line appears beneath it. Text dictated there is small and centred under the picture. It is a caption, not a paragraph.
• Alt text. The controls on an image include a box for alt text, the description read out by screen readers. It is a good thing to fill in, but it is not shown in the story.
• The link box. Choosing the link button, or pressing Command-K with text selected, opens a small box that expects a web address. A sentence dictated there becomes a broken link.
• The embed prompt. Choosing a video or an embed from the plus menu puts a prompt on the line that expects a pasted link, not prose.
• The search field. On Medium's other pages, the search field at the top is a text field like any other. A paragraph dictated there becomes a search.

If your words went into one of these, press Command-Z, or select them and cut them with Command-X. Press Escape to close any small pop-up box, click where the text belongs in the body, and paste.

4. Check what is selected before you speak

Dictation replaces whatever is selected, exactly as typing does. That matters more in Medium than in most editors, because selecting text is how you format it. You highlight a phrase to make it bold or turn it into a heading, a small toolbar appears, and when you are done the phrase is often still highlighted. The next thing you dictate replaces it.

The larger versions of the same accident are worse. A triple click selects a whole paragraph. Command-A selects the whole story, and one dictated sentence then replaces all of it. A click on an image selects the image, and the next characters to arrive can take its place.

What to do:

• Before you speak, click once where the new words should go, so that nothing is highlighted.
• If text vanished, press Command-Z straight away, before you click anywhere else.
• If you noticed too late, open the story's menu and look for its revision history. At the time of writing, Medium keeps earlier versions of a story that you can look through and restore.

5. Let lists, code blocks and mentions settle

Medium's editor watches what arrives and formats it for you. Most of the time that is a help. With dictation it can be a surprise.

• Lists. A line that begins with a number, a full stop and a space becomes a numbered list. A line that begins with a hyphen or an asterisk and a space becomes a bulleted list.
• Code. Backtick characters switch on code formatting, and three of them at the start of a line open a code block, where text is set in a fixed-width font and none of the automatic formatting applies.
• Mentions. An @ sign followed by letters opens a list of people. While that list is open, the Return and Tab keys choose from the list instead of doing their normal job. A person mentioned in a story can be notified when it is published.
• Typography. Medium turns straight quotation marks into curly ones and tidies some other punctuation, such as a pair of hyphens. That is by design.
• TK. Medium treats the letters TK as a writer's placeholder. It marks them in the margin and reminds you about them before you publish.

Dictated text lands as characters, so all of that can still happen. Whether it does depends on how your dictation tool delivers text. Characters that arrive like keystrokes trigger the formatting. Text that arrives like a paste usually lands as plain paragraphs.

What to do:

• If a list appears that you did not want, press Command-Z once. That usually undoes the conversion and keeps your words.
• If your text is suddenly in a fixed-width font on a shaded background, you are inside a code block. Click on an ordinary paragraph outside it before you carry on.
• Dictate the sentence first, then add mentions by hand. If a list of people opens that you did not want, press Escape.
• Read the story through before you publish. Look for a name that has turned into a highlighted mention and for a stray list number at the start of a paragraph.

6. Know what Return does in each part of the page

The Return key means different things in different parts of a Medium story.

• In the title, Return moves the cursor down into the body.
• In the body, Return starts a new paragraph. Shift-Return starts a new line inside the same paragraph.
• In a list, Return starts the next item, and Return on an empty item ends the list.
• In a code block, Return starts a new line of code and stays inside the block.
• After a link on a line of its own, Return can turn the link into an embedded card.

This matters for dictation because of how a line break is delivered. If you say "new line" or "new paragraph" and your dictation tool passes that to the page as a press of the Return key, you get whichever of those behaviours belongs to the place the cursor is in. In the body that is exactly what you want. In a list it adds an item you did not plan, and in a code block it keeps you inside the block.

What to do:

• Dictate body text a paragraph or a section at a time, and check that each paragraph break landed where you meant it.
• Add line breaks inside a paragraph, for an address or a few lines of verse, by hand with Shift-Return.
• Dictate the words of a heading or a quote as plain text, then select them and apply the format by hand.
• For anything long or carefully laid out, dictate it in TextEdit, Notes or Pages first, then paste it into the editor. Medium keeps the paragraphs, and it usually keeps basic formatting such as bold, italics, links and headings.

7. Treat the publish panel and the response box as separate fields

Clicking Publish does not publish straight away. It opens a panel with a few short fields: a preview title, a preview subtitle, and topics. All three take text, and none of them is your story.

• The preview title and subtitle control how the story is shown in feeds and emails. Medium says on the panel itself that changes there do not alter the contents of the story. A sentence dictated into one of them changes the preview and nothing else.
• The topic field is a picker, not a text box. You type a word and choose from the suggestions, up to five topics at the time of writing. A dictated sentence matches nothing. Say one word, or type it, then choose from the list.

The response box under a story is another separate field. It is collapsed until you click it, so open the responses, click in the box, and wait for the cursor before you speak. A response is public once you click Respond. Until then it exists only in the page in front of you. If a mistake does get through, the menu on your response lets you edit or delete it.

8. Watch the save status, and know where drafts go

The editor saves as you work and shows a save status near the top of the page. Wait for it to read as saved before you close the tab, reload, or put your Mac to sleep. If your connection drops, the editor cannot save, and whatever you dictate after that exists only in the open page.

Several things make a draft look lost when it is not, or put it at real risk:

• Every click on Write starts a new story. If the paragraph you dictated yesterday is missing, it may be sitting in another untitled draft. Check the drafts in your stories list.
• The same draft is open twice. Two tabs, or your Mac and your phone, can each hold a different copy of the story. Close all but one.
• A different account. Another browser or browser profile may be signed in to another Medium account, with its own list of drafts.
• A reload in the middle of a session. A browser that restarts for an update reloads the tab. Anything not yet saved goes with it.

For a long session, glance at the save status between sections. If it has not caught up, select the new text and copy it before you do anything else. And if an older version of the story is the one you want, look in the revision history.

9. Rule out the browser and its extensions

Medium's editor is not a plain text box. It is a custom editor that handles every keystroke itself so that it can format and save as you write. Dictation that types words provisionally and then revises them while you are still speaking can clash with that. The symptoms are doubled words, a missing first letter, or a cursor that jumps to another line. Tools that deliver a finished passage in one piece avoid most of it.

Because Medium is a web page, your browser also sits between dictation and the editor. The quickest check is to open Medium in a private window, or in a different browser, sign in and dictate into a throwaway draft. If it works there, something in your everyday browser profile is getting in the way.

Extensions are the usual cause. Writing assistants and grammar checkers attach themselves to any editable text, and they can move the cursor or rewrite text as it arrives. Ad blockers and privacy tools change pages, and so do extensions that restyle sites. Switch them off one at a time until dictation behaves. Our guides to Mac dictation not working in Chrome and in Safari cover the causes that belong to each browser.

If the editor still garbles what you say, dictate in shorter passages with a pause between them, or dictate in another app and paste the result.

10. Check dictation on your Mac

If you use a dictation app, check its two permissions under System Settings, then Privacy & Security. Microphone lets it hear you, and Accessibility lets it put text into your browser. After granting either one, quit the app and open it again. If your dictation shortcut is also a browser shortcut or one of Medium's own, the page may act on it first, and our guide to a Mac dictation shortcut that is not working shows how to find the clash.

If a dictation app's hotkey stopped responding in every app just after you typed a password somewhere, macOS may still be in Secure Input, which stops other apps from reading or sending keystrokes while a password field is active. Look for a password field or a password manager prompt still waiting in another window or tab, and close it.

If dictation failed in TextEdit too, Medium is not the problem. Open System Settings, go to Keyboard, and make sure Dictation is on. Check which shortcut it uses and that the dictation language is the one you are speaking. Check the input device under Sound as well, since a headset left in a drawer can still be the selected microphone. Then restart your Mac, which clears a stuck dictation service in one step.

Medium quirks that look like broken dictation

• Clicking shows a highlight menu, not a cursor. You are in the reading view. See fix 1.
• Readers still see the old text. Edits to a published story wait until you click Save and publish.
• The words are small and sit under a picture. You dictated into a caption. See fix 3.
• A link turned into a large card. A link on a line of its own became an embed. Undo it, or put the link inside a sentence.
• There is a TK in the margin. Those two letters appeared somewhere in your text, and Medium is reminding you to fill in a placeholder.
• The quotation marks changed shape. Medium tidies typography as text arrives. Nothing is wrong.
• The Listen button does not write anything. It reads the story aloud. It is not dictation.

Quick triage

• Nothing appears in Medium: you are in the reading view, or the body does not have the cursor. Fixes 1 and 2.
• A paragraph became the title: the cursor was on the first line. Fix 2.
• Words in a caption, a link box or search: a small field had the cursor. Fix 3.
• Existing text disappeared: it was selected when you spoke. Fix 4.
• A list, code or a mention appeared: the editor formatted what arrived. Fix 5.
• Breaks in the wrong places: Return means something different there. Fix 6.
• The topic field refused a sentence: it is a picker. Fix 7.
• Yesterday's text is missing: it is in another draft, or it never saved. Fix 8.
• Words doubled or the cursor jumped: the editor and the browser. Fix 9.
• Nothing works in any app: it is your Mac, not Medium. Fix 10.

Medium on a Mac versus on iPhone

The two behave differently enough that advice for one rarely transfers to the other. On a Mac, Medium is a web page, dictation starts from a shortcut or a hotkey, and nearly every problem comes down to focus and to what the editor does with the characters it receives. On an iPhone, Medium is an app with an editor of its own, dictation lives on the keyboard, and the usual causes are a missing mic key, a setting that has been switched off, or a tap on a screen that has no text field.

Our guide to dictating blog posts in Medium covers the everyday workflow on both devices. If you also publish elsewhere, the matching guides for Mac dictation not working in Substack and in WordPress cover what is different about those editors.

A dictation workflow that suits Medium

Most adults type at around 40 words per minute, professional typists usually reach 80 to 100, and normal speech runs at 130 to 150. A story of a thousand words or more is exactly the kind of writing where that gap adds up. A few habits keep it smooth.

• Draft first. Click in the body, talk a whole section through, and do not stop to format. A complete rough draft is easier to improve than a blank page.
• Format second, by hand. Headings, quotes, links, images and mentions are jobs for the mouse and keyboard. Do them in one pass after the words are down.
• Type the title last. A title is a few carefully chosen words. Typing it is quicker than dictating and correcting it.
• Read names and numbers back. A misheard name or figure is the kind of mistake readers notice.
• Check the save status between sections. It takes a second and it protects the last ten minutes of work.
• Type the topics. The topic field wants single words chosen from a list, which is not a job for speech.

One hotkey for every editor

Apple dictation is free and built in, but it can stop listening when you pause to think, it depends on settings that are easy to switch off by accident, and fixing a misheard word means going back and editing by hand.

Voice Keyboard Pro is a menu bar app for Mac. Click where you want the text, hold your hotkey, speak, and release. The text appears at your cursor, system-wide, in a Medium draft, in your email and in every other app you use. The microphone stays live while you hold the key, so a pause to find the right word does not end the session. Like any dictation app, it puts text wherever focus is, and Medium still decides what the title line, a caption or a list does with it, so fixes 1 to 9 still apply.

A few features are useful to people who write for a living:

• Smart Vocabulary is a personal dictionary with replacement rules, so the names of the people, products and publications you write about come out spelled your way every time.
• Meeting Mode, with speaker detection and AI notes, captures a meeting, so a piece that grows out of a conversation starts from what was actually said.
• Calendar meeting detection notices when a meeting on your calendar is about to start.

On privacy, our servers store only operational pings. No audio and no transcript content is stored, which matters when what you are dictating is a draft nobody has read yet. Pro is $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year, and the monthly plan starts with a 3-day free trial. On iPhone, the same product is a custom keyboard with a built-in mic button, so you can dictate in any iOS app, the Medium app included.

Frequently asked questions

Does Medium have voice typing on a Mac?

No. Medium's editor has no dictation of its own and no microphone button. On a Mac you dictate with the dictation built into macOS or with a dictation app, and both deliver text to whichever field has keyboard focus.

Is there a Medium app for Mac?

At the time of writing, Medium has no dedicated Mac app, so on a Mac you write in a browser. Safari and Chrome can install the site as an app-like window with its own Dock icon, and it behaves the same way with dictation.

Why did my whole paragraph become the title?

A new story opens with the cursor on the first line, which is the title. Cut the text, click on the line below, paste it there, and type a short title. Next time, click in the body before you start dictation.

Why did my sentence turn into a numbered list?

Medium's editor turns a line that starts with a number, a full stop and a space into a list. Press Command-Z once to undo the conversion. A line that starts with a hyphen or an asterisk becomes a bulleted list in the same way.

Why does dictation work in TextEdit but not in Medium?

Almost always because the editor does not have the cursor. You may be looking at a published story in the reading view, or focus may be in the title, a caption, the publish panel or another window. Open the story in the editor, click in the body until the cursor blinks, then speak.

Can I get back text that disappeared?

Often, yes. Press Command-Z first. If that is too late, check the other drafts in your stories list, and look at the story's revision history, which keeps earlier versions that you can restore.

Does my browser need microphone permission for dictation in Medium?

No. Apple dictation listens through macOS, and a dictation app uses its own Microphone and Accessibility permissions in System Settings. Medium's editor never asks for the microphone.

What to do next

Run the 30-second TextEdit test, then work through the fixes that match what you saw. For most people it is fix 1 or fix 2: the story was open in the reading view, or the cursor was in the title and not in the body. If existing text vanished, it is fix 4. If a list or a mention appeared from nowhere, it is fix 5. Whatever the cause, glance at the save status before you close the tab, and read the story through before you publish. And if you want dictation that works the same way in Medium, in your email and in every other app on your Mac, try Voice Keyboard Pro on your next draft.