From the Desk of
VoiceInk: free and fast dictation for macOS
VoiceInk is an open source Mac app by Prakash Joshi that transcribes your voice wherever your cursor is. Hold a key, talk, let go. It’s good.
I wanted to use Option+Shift as the activation keys, but the published version didn’t support modifier-only hotkeys. So I forked it and told Claude Code to change the key detection logic. It took way longer than it should have1 but it works decently well now.
I’m not planning on actively maintaining my fork, but I’m obsessive about latency, so if a faster on-device model drops, I’ll integrate it. The download link above checks for updates automatically via Sparkle.
If you get value from VoiceInk, you should pay Prakash for it.
How I use it
I dictate most of what I write now. Something about talking instead of typing gets different stuff out of my head — I stop editing mid-sentence and just say things. Andy Sparks has a good piece on building a writing process around dictation.
Especially for prompting Claude… like a lifetime of writing Google queries trained me to write maximally dense input strings …that Claude doesn’t understand and fills in gaps with wickedly wrong assumptions. To cope with Claude being amazingly wildly stupid2, I dictate rambling repetitive like insane person at the bus stop saying the same thing three different ways… basically I’m learning to speak Claude’s native language. Turns out the best way to communicate with an LLM (April 2026 Version) is the way you’d explain something to a person who’s not really listening. Eeps: Dario meant “data center full of PhDs” distressingly literally!
I use Parakeet v3 for the transcription, which runs entirely on-device on Apple Silicon. VoiceInk also supports a post-processing step where a language model cleans up grammar and spelling — I have it pointed at Cerebras running GPT OSS 120B. In practice it over-corrects constantly and sometimes mangles what I actually said into what it thinks I should have said. I keep meaning to turn it off. I haven’t yet.