Contextual Awareness

What Is Contextual Awareness?

Contextual Awareness is an optional feature that captures text from your active window and passes it to EmberType's AI enhancement engine. This gives the AI model context about what you're working on, so it can produce more accurate and relevant transcriptions.

For example, if you're writing an email about a project called "Horizon," EmberType sees that context and is more likely to transcribe the word "Horizon" correctly instead of guessing "horizon" or "horizontal."

How It Works

When you start a transcription with Contextual Awareness enabled, EmberType:

1. Captures your active window
   Uses macOS ScreenCaptureKit to take a snapshot of the frontmost application window.
2. Extracts text with OCR
   Apple's Vision framework reads the text on screen with accurate recognition and automatic language detection.
3. Builds a context block
   The active window title, application name, and extracted text are assembled into a context block.
4. Passes context to AI enhancement
   The context is included alongside your transcription when AI Enhancement processes your text, improving accuracy for names, technical terms, and topic-specific vocabulary.

Setup and Permissions

Contextual Awareness requires Screen Recording permission to capture your active window.

Granting Screen Recording Permission

1. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen Recording
2. Find EmberType in the list
3. Toggle it ON
4. Restart EmberType if prompted

Enabling Contextual Awareness

1. Open EmberType settings
2. Find the Screen Context toggle under AI Enhancement
3. Turn it ON

AI Enhancement must be enabled for Contextual Awareness to work. The toggle will appear dimmed if AI Enhancement is turned off.

When to Use Contextual Awareness

Contextual Awareness is most useful when your dictation relates to what's on screen:

• Emails and messages — replying to someone by name, referencing specific topics in the thread
• Code and technical writing — dictating variable names, function names, or project-specific terms
• Documents and reports — continuing a sentence or paragraph with consistent terminology
• Research and note-taking — summarizing content you're reading on screen

You may want to leave it off when dictating content unrelated to your screen, or if you prefer maximum transcription speed without the extra processing step.

Contextual Awareness in Power Mode

Each Power Mode can have its own Contextual Awareness setting. This lets you enable it for specific workflows without changing your default configuration.

For example, you might create a Power Mode for "Email Writing" with Context Awareness on, and a "Quick Notes" mode with it off for faster dictation.

To configure it per Power Mode, open the Power Mode settings and toggle Context Awareness for each mode individually.

Privacy and Data Handling

EmberType was built with privacy as a core principle. Here's exactly what happens with your screen data:

• Processed locally — all OCR and text extraction runs on your Mac using Apple's Vision framework
• Never stored — captured text is held in memory only for the duration of the transcription, then discarded
• Never uploaded — no screen data ever leaves your device
• No screenshots saved — the screen capture is used only for text extraction and is immediately released

Read our full Privacy Policy for more details.

Troubleshooting

Contextual Awareness toggle is dimmed

AI Enhancement must be enabled for Contextual Awareness to work. Turn on AI Enhancement in your settings first.

Screen Recording permission not detected

1. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen Recording
2. If EmberType is listed, toggle it OFF then ON again
3. If not listed, click + and add EmberType from your Applications folder
4. Restart EmberType after changing permissions

No noticeable improvement in accuracy

• Make sure you're dictating content related to what's on screen
• Use a larger AI model (Large v3 Turbo or Parakeet) for better results
• Check that AI Enhancement is enabled and working