Blog
Notes on dictation, speech recognition and voice typing
Notes from building an on-device dictation app: what speech models get wrong, why "cleaning up" is a harder promise than rewriting, and what runs on your machine versus someone else’s.
Guides
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Dictating prompts to ChatGPT and Claude
Why spoken prompts come out longer and more specific than typed ones, and how to dictate them into a browser chat box on a Mac without losing the text.
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Writing issues an agent can act on
An issue is a prompt that outlives the conversation. How to dictate issues, tasks and review comments so an agent — or a person — can act on them.
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Voice input for Claude Code
How Claude Code’s built-in /voice relates to a system-wide dictation layer, and how to dictate prompts in the terminal, Cursor and the browser with Voicecape.
Articles
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What Voicecape sends over the network
Three requests, all named and verifiable from outside the app: a licence activation, a background re-check of it at most weekly, and a daily update check.
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Dictation for developers
Code is a bad thing to dictate. The prose around code — commit messages, PR descriptions, review comments, docs — is a very good one.
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macOS permissions for dictation
Microphone, Accessibility and Input Monitoring: what each is for, why macOS asks separately, and what to do when one looks granted but nothing happens.
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Typing with your voice in any app
How text gets from a dictation app into the window you are looking at on macOS: accessibility APIs, the clipboard path, and why browsers differ.
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Korean voice typing on a Mac
What makes Korean harder for a speech model than English, and why filler removal works differently in a language without spaces between clauses.
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One model, five languages
How a single multilingual speech model handles English, Korean, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese — including a sentence that switches language halfway through.
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Choosing a Whisper model size
Why a bigger speech model is not simply better, what changes between tiny, base, small and large-v3-turbo, and the failure mode that made us ship a 547 MB model.
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Why Mac dictation gets names wrong
Speech models predict likely words, and your colleague’s name is not a likely word. Why a personal dictionary fixes what a bigger model cannot.
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Verbatim versus cleaned dictation
When you want every word you said, and when you want the sentence you meant. Two modes, and how to tell which one a piece of writing needs.
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What "cleaned, never rewritten" removes
The exact list: fillers, accidental repeats, trailing filler phrases and orphaned commas. And the list of things deliberately left alone, including self-corrections.
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Does dictation software send your voice to the cloud?
How to find out for yourself, on any dictation app, in about five minutes — with airplane mode and a firewall monitor, rather than by reading a privacy policy.
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On-device versus cloud speech recognition
What differs between recognition that runs on your Mac and recognition that runs on a server: latency, cost, offline behaviour and who holds the audio.
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Why dictation software rewrites what you said
Most AI dictation tools do not transcribe you — they paraphrase you. Here is the technical reason why, and what a tool has to give up to stop doing it.