Permissions

macOS asks for each of these separately, and you can say no to any of them. Saying no disables the feature that needs it — nothing else.

Microphone

Needed for: every kind of dictation.

VerbaIDE listens to your microphone to turn your speech into text. The audio is processed on your Mac and is not stored.

Speech recognition

Needed for: recognition through Apple’s own engine — which covers twelve languages, not only English: English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and both written forms of Chinese.

Russian and Ukrainian dictation runs on a model downloaded to your Mac and does not need this permission. Subtitles in one of the twelve above do. If you say no and a language stops working, this is why.

Accessibility

Needed for: typing into the field your cursor is in.

This is the permission that lets VerbaIDE put text into another app’s text field. Without it, dictation recognises your speech and has nowhere to put it.

Audio capture from apps

Needed for: subtitles and meeting recording — hearing the other side of a call.

This one has no API to ask “am I allowed?”. macOS answers by refusing to create the audio tap, and the app reads that refusal as “not allowed”. If subtitles say the source is unavailable and you believe the permission is granted, this is usually why.

If you said no

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, find the permission, and turn VerbaIDE on. Some permissions take effect on the next launch of the app.

The menu bar shows a warning when the microphone, speech recognition or Accessibility permission is missing. Audio capture from apps is not in that warning, and cannot be: there is no way to ask macOS about it in advance — you find out when a subtitle session refuses to start.

A note on languages

The wording macOS shows in these dialogs comes from the app in your system language. If you change the app’s language by hand, the system dialog follows on the next launch, not immediately.