How voice works

When your Right Hand starts working, what the Listening and Working screens mean, muting, and sharing your screen on a call.

When you talk to your Right Hand, you don't press send. It listens, decides you've finished, and then starts working.

When does it start working?

It starts after a pause in your speech:

  • About 2.5 seconds of silence after a finished thought.
  • About 4 seconds of silence if your words trail off mid-thought (for example "and…", "so…" or "um"). It gives you a little longer before answering.

So after you stop talking, expect a short wait before the screen changes. That wait is normal.

What the screen is telling you

  • Listening… it can hear you.
  • Working on it… / Working it has your request and is working. Your microphone is switched off while it works, and the panel shows Mic off while working.
  • It then speaks the answer. You can start talking over it to interrupt.

Muting

The Mute button (or the M key) stops the microphone and shows a red Muted badge.

Muting while it is still waiting out the pause used to leave the screen stuck on Listening, because the pause timer stopped with the microphone. In the current version, what you said is sent when you mute, so muting ends your turn instead of leaving you guessing. If your desktop app is an older version and stays on Listening after you mute, update the app. In the meantime, wait for the screen to flip to Working before you mute.

Sharing your screen during a call

On the desktop app you can show your Right Hand what you are looking at while you talk.

  1. Start a voice conversation.
  2. Choose Share screen and pick a whole screen or a single window.
  3. On a Mac, the first time you may need to allow Screen Recording for Dynamiq in System Settings → Privacy & Security, then reopen Dynamiq.
  4. Talk as normal. When you finish speaking, your Right Hand sees what was on screen, including what changed while you were talking, and can refer to it.
  5. Choose Stop sharing when you're done. While you share, the panel header says what you are sharing.

Good to know: the shared picture is a reduced-size snapshot taken about every second and a half, and only when the screen changes. It is not a recording.

Still stuck?

See Talk to BrainiQ for microphone problems, or Send us diagnostics.