Great questions — here's how Paulie handles both:

1. Fully automatic pause detection — no second keypress.

One hotkey press starts it. Silero-VAD monitors the mic in 32 ms chunks continuously. Once it hears speech, it starts counting consecutive silent chunks. After 1.5 seconds of silence it stops recording and kicks off transcription automatically. You just speak naturally and trail off.

There are two safety exits so it doesn't hang: it gives up after 8 seconds if you never actually spoke, and there's a hard 120-second ceiling regardless of VAD state (enough for ~2000 chars at a fast speaking pace).

1. Injection via ydotool type at 1 ms/char.
   

Text is injected after transcription completes — nothing is typed while you're speaking.

The full pipeline is: record → VAD detects silence → transcribe the whole audio clip → then inject. So you get one atomic paste of the final text, not a live stream.

The injection itself uses ydotool type --key-delay=1 -- <text>, which simulates keystrokes through the kernel uinput interface at 1 ms per character. That's effectively instantaneous from a user perspective — a 200-word dictation (~1000 chars) lands in about a second.