← Tessen

Install & Permissions Guide

Last updated: 2026-08-25

1. Requirements

2. Install

  1. Download the .dmg from the pricing section.
  2. Open the .dmg and drag Tessen into /Applications.
  3. Launch Tessen from Applications or Spotlight. It lives in the menu bar — there is no dock icon or main window, by design.

3. The three permissions macOS will ask for

The first time you try to dictate, macOS will prompt for each of these in turn. Grant all three — Tessen cannot work correctly with only some of them.

Microphone

Required to hear you at all. If you accidentally deny this, re-enable it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and restart Tessen.

Speech Recognition

Some macOS versions gate on-device speech frameworks behind this permission separately from the microphone. Grant it the same way, under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Speech Recognition.

Accessibility

This is the one people miss, and it is the single most common reason Tessen appears to "do nothing."

Accessibility is what lets Tessen type the words it heard into whatever app your cursor is in. Without it, dictation can still run internally — you may see the listening indicator, and nothing looks broken — but no text ever lands anywhere, because Tessen has no permission to type on your behalf. There is no error dialog for this; it is simply silent.

Grant it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, then toggle Tessen on. If Tessen isn't in the list yet, click the + button and add it from /Applications. After granting it, quit and reopen Tessen once so the change takes effect.

4. First dictation

  1. Click into any text field — Mail, Notes, a browser, your terminal, anything.
  2. Hold the hotkey (Fn by default) and speak.
  3. Release the hotkey. Your words should appear where your cursor was, cleaned up and punctuated.

If nothing appears after releasing the hotkey, the almost-certain cause is a missing Accessibility grant — see Section 3 above before anything else.

5. Still stuck?

Email [email protected] with what you tried and what happened (or didn't). A human reads every message.