Dictation is lost if I leave the chat before transcription finishes

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Mar 8, 2026 by AaronRayRay Closed Jun 22, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

Version 26.305.950 (863)

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 25.3.0 arm64 arm (MacBook Pro - Apple M3 Pro)

What issue are you seeing?

When I use the mic icon to dictate a message in a chat, long dictation sessions can take a while to process into text after I press Stop or Send.

If I press Stop or Send and then switch to another chat, either by clicking New Thread or opening a different chat in the same or another thread, the dictation often disappears completely.

When I return to the original chat, the recording is no longer processing, no text has been generated and nothing has been sent. The dictated content appears to be lost entirely.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Press the dictate icon so it starts listening.
Speak for a few minutes.
Press the white Send button or Stop button so it starts processing.
Click into another chat session or New Thread
Return to the original chat session.

What is the expected behavior?

I would expect once I've pressed the stop button or the send button, it would continue to process in the background and either:

If the stop button pressed - the text should display in the chat box ready for me to read/edit
If the send button is pressed - the text is sent in the chat in the background and codex starts working as you would expect

Additional information

This happens frequently and is very frustrating because it causes complete loss of longer dictated messages if I move to another chat before processing finishes.

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 5 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

##12318
##13727

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AaronRayRay · 5 months ago

I am aware of both issues cited which relates to issue https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/10743 but it seems to be a different behavior but related to the same thing.

My issue is the dictation is lost completely not carried over to the thread that I switch into like these other three threads have mentioned.

codefactory-hub · 4 months ago

I hit this today on Codex desktop as well.

Environment:

Codex app: 26.422.30944
Platform: macOS 26.4.1 build 25E253
Timezone: America/Denver

What happened:

I had an existing paragraph already typed in the composer.
I clicked the Codex mic/dictation button.
I dictated for about 8 minutes.
While the dictation/transcription flow was still in progress, I switched to another Codex thread.
When I returned to the original thread, the composer still had the paragraph that was there before dictation started, but none of the dictated text appeared.
I could not find a recoverable transcript or audio artifact in Codex logs/cache/local storage.

The useful distinction: switching to another macOS app while continuing to dictate into Codex works fine for me. The data loss seems tied to Codex-internal navigation / composer lifecycle, not ordinary OS focus changes.

This looks related to:

#18344, which covers recording/sending voice and then switching threads.
#18223, which covers long voice input being silently lost with no recoverable draft/audio.
#16819, which covers dictated content being deleted/lost.
#13590, which covers dictation being canceled by command approval prompts.

This makes me think the dictation/transcription job is too tightly coupled to the currently mounted composer UI. It should probably be durable at the app/session layer and associated with the originating thread, so if the composer unmounts or the user switches threads, the transcript can still complete and be rediscovered.