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You spoke, and either a No Audio Detected notice appeared — “The recording contained no detectable audio” — or the dictation finished and produced nothing at all. Both mean the same thing from the app’s side: no words came out of the audio it had. That happens for a small number of reasons, and they’re quick to separate.
First, before you re-record anything: if history is on, your audio is still on disk and you can transcribe it again without repeating yourself. See I lost a dictation.

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Quick checks

1

Check the right microphone is being used

The most common cause by far. Your computer may have switched inputs — to a headset that isn’t on your head, or to a monitor’s built-in mic across the room. Open Settings, choose Privacy & Data under System, and look at the Permissions section to confirm the microphone is granted; then check which input device your operating system has selected.Full walkthrough: My microphone isn’t working.
2

Watch the level while you speak

Start a dictation and speak normally. If the app shows no movement at all, the audio never reached it and the problem is the device or the permission, not the transcription.
3

Speak a little longer

Very short takes — a word or two, or a hotkey pressed and released almost immediately — often contain too little speech to produce a result. Try a full sentence.
4

Try the other processing mode

If you’re on OpenWhispr Cloud, try a local model, or the other way around. Whichever one works tells you where the problem is.The engine is set per mode — dictation, note recording and audio upload each have their own. Open Settings, choose Speech-to-Text under AI Models, and use the Dictation tab for dictation.

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If your microphone was fine

A few situations produce a genuinely empty result even though audio was captured:
  • The recording was silent or nearly silent. A muted headset, a hardware mute switch, or an input whose gain is at zero. Debug logs record the measured level for exactly this reason.
  • Another app had exclusive hold of the microphone. Conferencing apps are the usual ones. Quit it and try again.
  • The audio wasn’t speech. Background noise on its own generally produces nothing rather than nonsense, which is the intended behaviour.

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Get us the log

This is the case where a debug log settles it in one round instead of several. It records the audio level the app measured, so it distinguishes “the microphone sent silence” from “the microphone sent nothing” from “transcription ran and returned empty” — three different fixes that look identical from the outside. How to send us a debug log

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FAQ

Usually not. History is on by default and audio is kept for 30 days, so you can re-transcribe it — see I lost a dictation. The exception is a dictation you cancelled with Escape, which isn’t kept unless you’ve turned that on.
Check whether your default input device changed — plugging in headphones, docking a laptop, or joining a call can move it. On macOS, an app update can also require you to grant the microphone permission again; see Updates and reinstalling.
That’s a different problem — see The words come out wrong.