Last updated: 2025-12-26
App Store rating: 4.9 / 5. See reviews.
Quick answers
Setup in 30 seconds
- Download from the Mac App Store and open Voice Type.
- Choose your preferred model (optimized for Apple silicon, works on Intel too).
- Press and hold your hotkey (default ⌥ Space), speak, release to finalise.
Hotkey voice typing anywhere
Trigger dictation from any app with a single hold-to-dictate shortcut. When you release, Voice Type finalises the last few seconds and inserts the text where your cursor lives.
Accuracy you can feel
Voice Type uses beam search decoding rather than greedy decoding, exploring multiple transcriptions simultaneously for higher accuracy on complex phrases. We condition audio (loudness normalization via LUFS metering, noise reduction via RNNoise, silence trimming) before recognition so technical terms and product names transcribe correctly.
Custom vocabulary uses prompt conditioning following Whisper best practices—add product names, jargon, and technical terms that stick. See examples on the Accuracy page.
Dragon-level punctuation
Voice Type has near-parity with Dragon Dictate for spoken punctuation—a key feature professional dictation users expect. Say "period", "comma", "question mark", "new line", "new paragraph" naturally while speaking. No special syntax or pauses required.
Sub-2-second finalization
Voice Type finalizes in under 2 seconds regardless of how long you dictate. The streaming architecture processes audio in ~30-second windows as you speak, so when you release the hotkey, only the last segment needs finalizing—not the entire recording.
Processing runs entirely on-device using Apple's Core ML and Metal for GPU acceleration. No network round-trips, consistent latency whether you dictate for 10 seconds or 10 minutes. Try the latency demo with your own setup.
Troubleshooting
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FAQ
- How accurate is Voice Type?
- We improve clarity before recognition and optimise for everyday technical terms. See live examples on the Accuracy page.
- How do I turn on voice typing on a Mac?
- → System Settings → Keyboard → Dictation → On. Voice Type adds a global hotkey so you can talk in any app.
- Is Voice Type offline?
- Yes—processing runs on your Mac. Accuracy, speed, and privacy come first; offline processing keeps latency steady.
- Why does offline dictation feel faster?
- No network round-trips. When you release the hotkey, we only finalise the last few seconds before inserting text.
- Does Voice Type require an account?
- No. Purchase once on the Mac App Store after the 7-day trial.
- What Mac models are supported?
- All Macs that support Apple’s on-device speech frameworks, including Apple silicon and Intel models.
References & further reading
- OpenAI Whisper (GitHub) - The open-source speech recognition model architecture
- Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision - Original Whisper research paper (OpenAI, 2022)
- RNNoise (GitHub) - Recurrent neural network for audio noise suppression
- RNNoise: Learning Noise Suppression - Technical demo and explanation by Jean-Marc Valin
- Apple Core ML Documentation - On-device machine learning framework
- Apple: Dictate messages and documents on Mac - Official macOS dictation guide
- Hacker News: Whisper large-v2 discussion - Community discussion on Whisper accuracy improvements