Raycast Dictate to AI Explained: Talk to AI About What's on Your Screen

Raycast Dictate to AI Explained: Talk to AI About What's on Your Screen

You are staring at an email that needs a careful reply. You open a chat window, paste the email in, type your question, wait for the answer, then copy the draft back into your inbox. Five steps for one reply, repeated a dozen times a day.

Raycast's update on November 4, 2026, tries to cut that dance down to one step. Version 2.11 of the Mac and Windows launcher adds a command called Dictate to AI. You press a hotkey, say what you want, and Raycast sends your words to its AI together with whatever app you have open. The AI already sees the email. You just talk.

It is a small feature with a big idea behind it. Voice is becoming the way people talk to AI, and the screen is becoming the context the AI needs. Raycast is not the only app moving this way. Google added system-wide dictation to the Gemini app for Mac, Meta AI's Mac app has dictation built in, and Apple opened its Siri AI app skills to third-party developers in a preview this month.

What Dictate to AI actually does

Dictate to AI is a voice command inside Raycast. Press its hotkey, speak a request, and two things travel to the AI model: your words, and the contents of the app you are focused on. Raycast calls the second part Screen Awareness. It arrived in August 2026, and it already let AI Chat pull in text from the active app so you did not have to copy text or explain what you were looking at. Dictate to AI puts your voice in front of that same pipeline.

The difference from ordinary dictation is the destination. Ordinary dictation turns your voice into text and drops it where your cursor sits. Dictate to AI turns your voice into a question and sends it, plus your screen, to an AI model that answers. You do not get a transcript. You get a response.

Four everyday moments where it earns its keep

The feature sounds abstract until you match it to the moments people actually lose time. Here are the four where it helps most.

The email that needs a careful reply. This is the flagship use. You read a message from a client or a manager, press the hotkey, and say what you want the reply to do. "Say yes, but push the meeting to next week and ask for the budget numbers first." The draft comes back with the names and dates already in it.

The long document you do not have time to read. A 20-page contract, a policy update, a project brief. Open it, ask for the three decisions or the deadline, and get a short answer. Read the answer against the original before you act on it. A summary is a shortcut, not a source.

The spreadsheet question. You are looking at a table of numbers and you want one fact from it. Ask out loud instead of hunting through rows. "Which month had the most signups?" works when the sheet is the active window and the numbers are visible.

The message you need to draft fast. A Slack reply to your team, a short update to a client. Speak the gist, get a draft, fix the tone, paste it in. It is quicker than typing when you already know what you want to say and slower when you do not, so it rewards people who think out loud.

Setting it up takes about five minutes

You need Raycast 2.11 or later and a paid Raycast plan. The command does not exist on the free tier.

1. Update Raycast to version 2.11. On a Mac, open Raycast, press Cmd + , to open Settings, and check for updates. On Windows, the update should arrive automatically.
2. Open Raycast and search for Dictate to AI. The command is listed with the rest of Raycast's AI commands.
3. Give it a hotkey you can reach without thinking. Raycast suggests Control + A on a Mac and Alt + A on Windows. Pick something else on a Mac if you spend time in text fields or the Terminal, where Control + A already means "jump to the beginning of the line."
4. Test it on something low stakes. Open an old email, press the hotkey, and say "summarize this in one sentence." Check that the answer matches what you see on screen. Then test it in a second app, a document and a browser tab, because the whole point is that it follows your focus.
5. Turn on the AI usage counter while you are in Settings. Go to Settings, then AI, then Show AI Usage in Menu Bar. Raycast moved its paid plans to usage-based AI credits, so the counter tells you how much of your allowance you have used before a heavy week runs it out. Version 2.11 also adds a Dictation AI extension that lets you reuse transcriptions in AI Chat and manage your dictation styles.

The privacy setting to change first

Here is the part worth reading twice. When app context is on, Raycast sends what is on your screen to an AI service along with your words. That is the entire point of the feature, and it is also the risk. If you have a bank account, a private message, or a work document with client data open, that content goes along for the ride unless you switch context off.

You can switch the app context off in the command's settings, and you should decide once, now, rather than discovering the choice after you have sent a screen full of sensitive information to a model. A sensible default is context off for anything with money or personal data, context on for ordinary work documents and emails.

The dictation itself has a cleaner story. Raycast's manual says your voice is not used to train AI models, audio is not stored on Raycast's servers, and transcripts stay on your device. That covers the spoken words. The screen content is a different matter: the 2.11 changelog does not spell out whether it follows the same rules once it reaches an AI model. Treat the toggle as a real decision.

One more warning, specific to Windows. Version 2.11 also brings Send Element to AI and Send Window to AI. The second one sends a whole window as context, including sidebars and notifications. Hover over one paragraph and send that instead when the rest of the window is not something you want shared.

What it costs

Raycast itself is free, but its AI features and dictation are not. They were free during the beta and moved into the paid plans when Raycast 2.0 launched in August 2026. Here is the current pricing, verified against Raycast's pricing page in November 2026.

Plan: Free; Monthly: $0; Yearly: $0; AI credits per month: None; Dictation: No

Plan: Pro; Monthly: $10; Yearly: $96; AI credits per month: 500; Dictation: Yes

Plan: Plus; Monthly: $20; Yearly: $192; AI credits per month: 3,000; Dictation: Yes

Plan: Max; Monthly: $50; Yearly: $480; AI credits per month: 7,500; Dictation: Yes

A few details that matter when you do the math. New accounts can start a free Pro trial, and the trial credits expire after seven days. Verified students get 50 percent off Pro. Unused credits do not expire for 60 days. And if you already pay for Claude or ChatGPT, you can link that subscription to any paid Raycast plan and use those models through Raycast instead of spending Raycast credits.

The honest verdict on price is simple. If you already pay for Raycast Pro, update to 2.11 and try Dictate to AI this week. It costs you nothing extra. If you do not, $96 a year only makes sense if you will use AI on your Mac every day.

Dictate to AI vs plain dictation: which job are you doing?

This distinction decides whether the feature is for you. Dictate to AI answers questions about what is on your screen. Plain dictation writes words where your cursor is. They look similar, they feel similar, and they solve different problems.

Use Dictate to AI when you want an answer. Summarize this, explain that, draft a reply to this email. The AI does the thinking, and the screen gives it the facts.

Use plain dictation when you already know what you want to say and just want it typed. A long email you have composed in your head, meeting notes, a journal entry, a message to a friend. No AI answer is needed, and sending your screen to a model would add nothing but cost and a privacy question.

That split is also the price test. A dedicated dictation tool types your words into any app and charges far less than a full AI subscription, because it is doing a narrower job. Oravo dictation, for example, types wherever your cursor is on Mac, Windows, and Android, with 5,000 words free and Pro at $9.99 a month, and it never needs to see your screen to do it. If your daily habit is writing by voice rather than asking an AI questions about open windows, the cheaper tool is the right one.

Who should try it, and who should skip it

Try it this week if you already pay for Raycast Pro and you live in your launcher all day. The feature is already included in what you pay, and a week of real use will tell you more than any review.

Try the seven-day trial if you ask an AI questions about your screen several times a day and you are tired of the copy, paste, type routine. Set the hotkey, test it on real work, and watch the credit counter. If you run out before the week ends, the $10 plan is too small for your habit.

Skip it if you only want to write by voice. Plain dictation is cheaper, simpler, and does not send your screen anywhere. Skip it too if you mostly work on a phone, because this is a desktop feature.

Frequently asked questions

Does Dictate to AI work on Windows? Yes. Version 2.11 brings it to Windows as well as Mac, and Windows also gets Screen Awareness for the first time. The AI usage counter in the menu bar is Mac only for now.

Does Raycast store my voice or my screen? According to Raycast's manual, your voice is not used to train models, audio is not stored on its servers, and transcripts stay on your device. The screen context is sent to an AI service with your request. You can turn the context off in the command's settings, and you should if you work with sensitive material.

Can I use my own ChatGPT or Claude subscription? Yes. Since version 2.3 you can link a Claude or ChatGPT subscription to any paid Raycast plan and use those models through Raycast. That does not remove the $10 a month floor, since Dictate to AI still needs a paid plan, but it means your questions do not have to consume Raycast credits.

The bigger picture

Raycast 2.11 is a small update that points at a large shift. A year ago, voice typing meant turning speech into text. Now the same spoken sentence can carry a question, and the app you are looking at supplies the context. Granola did it with meeting vocabulary in October. Gemini and Meta AI did it with system-wide dictation on the Mac. Raycast did it with a launcher command this week.

That is a genuinely better way to work for the questions, and a needlessly expensive one for the writing. Know which job you are doing before you pay for it, and check the context toggle before you press the hotkey. The rest is just talking.