Dictation

Dictation is push-to-talk into the compose bar: press and hold, speak, release. It exists because typing a paragraph of instruction on a phone keyboard is the slowest part of using BattleLab from a phone.

It uses the browser's own speech recognition — there is no audio upload, no transcription service, and no configuration.

What it does to your draft

Spoken text is appended to the draft that existed when you started, with a single separator inserted only where one is needed, so dictation reads as a continuation of what you had already typed rather than replacing it.

That behaviour is more carefully guarded than it looks. A browser SpeechRecognition session is not a recording you control: the engine decides when it has ended, and in non-continuous mode it ends after every single utterance — so a naive implementation stops the whole dictation the moment you pause for breath. Press-and-hold is held open across those engine-initiated endings.

Anything that edits the draft destructively is gated on a positive, in-stream signal that the engine actually produced the state being acted on — never on a timer and never on a guess about which browser you are using.

When it does not work

Failures are reported specifically rather than as one generic "microphone blocked", because the distinction is the whole diagnosis:

• mic blocked — the browser denied permission for this site.
• no microphone found — no capture device.
• Other SpeechRecognition error codes are surfaced with their own note.

It needs a secure context and an explicit policy

Browser speech recognition requires HTTPS, so dictation will not work over plain HTTP. BattleLab also sets its own Permissions-Policy header, and it must permit the microphone for the app's own origin (microphone=(self)) — a blanket microphone=() disables dictation entirely while producing exactly the generic "microphone blocked" message that makes the cause hard to find. Those headers come from the app, not from your reverse proxy.

Verified against

Commit 218cf3a — web/src/components/terminal/Compose.tsx; web/src/lib/dictation.ts; src/agent_sessions/security_headers.py § Permissions-Policy.