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Your voice agent has a name, and saying it at the start of a dictation is one of the two ways to reach the agent. The app puts it plainly: “When you say ‘Hey [name]’ followed by an instruction, the AI executes your command — composing content, formatting text, or answering questions — instead of transcribing it verbatim.” The name is removed from what gets typed, so you don’t see it in the output.

The default is “OpenWhispr”

Out of the box your agent is called OpenWhispr, and the feature is on. That combination is worth knowing about, because “OpenWhispr” is a word you might genuinely dictate — telling a colleague what you use, writing a review, describing your setup. If a dictation starts with it, it goes to the agent.
If you use the agent, rename it to something you would never say by accident — the app suggests names like Jarvis, Nova, or Atlas. If you don’t use it, switch it off. Either one removes the surprise.

When the name counts as addressing it

Not every mention triggers the agent. The name only counts when it’s genuinely being addressed, which means one of:
  • It’s the first thing in the dictation.
  • It follows a greetinghey, hi, hello, ok, okay, yo, or please.
  • It starts a new sentence, after a full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark.
A mention anywhere else is treated as ordinary text. Dictating “I showed OpenWhispr to a friend” types that sentence — the name is in the middle, so it’s content, not a command.

Near-misses count too

Speech-to-text doesn’t always hear a name cleanly, so matching is deliberately forgiving — it allows for a small number of wrong letters, and for the name being split into two words. A name like “OpenWhispr” will also match things like “open whisper”. Longer names get slightly more tolerance than short ones. Names of one character are ignored entirely. The trade-off is intentional: it means the agent answers when you address it slightly imprecisely, at the cost of occasionally triggering on something close.

Changing the name

  1. Open Settings, choose Language Models under AI Models, then the Voice Agent tab.
  2. Type a new name in Agent Name.
  3. Click Save.
You’ll get a confirmation telling you the new name and how to address it. Pick something “short and natural to say aloud” — the app’s own advice, and good advice, since you have to say it out loud mid-sentence. Renaming also adds the new name to your custom dictionary, so it’s transcribed reliably.

Switching it off

On the same tab, turn off Enable voice agent. That stops the name trigger completely — dictation is then always transcribed.
Switching it off here also disables the agent reached by the Voice Agent Hotkey, since they’re the same feature. If you want to keep the hotkey and only lose the name trigger, rename the agent to something you’d never say instead of turning it off.