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Quick task capture (speak a to-do)

Hold right ⌥ and say a task out loud — it's parsed on your Mac and dropped onto your action items instead of being typed.

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Written by Junan Pang

Sometimes you need to capture a task without opening anything or interrupting what you're doing. Quick task capture turns speech into an action item instead of typed text.

Turning it on

Menu bar → Dictation Settings… → General → Quick task capture.

Using it

Hold right ⌥ (right Option) and speak naturally:

"Remind me to send Alec the deck Friday."

Release. Amlin parses the task, the owner, and the date on your Mac, and drops it onto your Action items. A notification confirms it: "Added to Open loops." Click it to jump to the list.

Nothing is typed into whatever app you're in — that's the whole point. It's a separate hotkey from fn precisely so the two never get confused.

What it understands

  • Dates and relative times — "Friday", "next Tuesday", "end of the month"

  • Owners — "ask Priya to review the contract" lands under Waiting on

  • Multiple tasks in one utterance, each captured separately

Anything it gets wrong is editable in the Action items view like any other item.

The "Quick captures" note

Spoken tasks aren't attached to a meeting, so Amlin keeps them together in a single note called Quick captures, marked with a 🎤 badge in your library. You can open it like any other note — it's just the home for tasks that came from your voice rather than a conversation.

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