DuckTypeDuckType

Dictation

Talk. It just appears.

Voice to text in any app on your Mac. Pastes at your cursor. No copy and paste, no separate window, no waiting on the cloud.

Download for macOSWhere it works
Other platforms
You said this
claude.ai/ new chat

Draft a release email about meetings v2 going GA next Tuesday. Friendly, three short paragraphs, end with a link to the changelog.

text appeared at the cursor in claude.ai

Anywhere a cursor blinks

Works in every app. Not just text fields.

DuckType pastes at the OS level, not through a browser extension or a per-app integration. If your cursor is in a window and you can type into it, you can talk into it.

AI assistants

  • Claude
  • ChatGPT
  • Gemini
  • Perplexity

Code editors

  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • VS Code
  • Terminal
  • Xcode
  • Zed

Writing surfaces

  • Notion
  • Obsidian
  • Apple Notes
  • Bear
  • Linear

Communication

  • Slack
  • Discord
  • Messages
  • Mail
  • Zoom chat

Browsers and beyond

  • Safari
  • Chrome
  • Arc
  • Firefox

The list above is illustrative. The actual answer is "any app that accepts keyboard input on macOS." We have not found one where it does not work.

How you start a recording

Four ways to start. Pick the one that disappears.

The right shortcut is the one you forget you are using. Map it to a key your hand already lives near.

Hold to Record

Hold a key while you speak, release to transcribe. Fn is bound by default. Native-feeling, no shortcut to remember.

holdfn

Start/Stop Recording

Tap a shortcut once to start, tap again to stop. Good for longer dictation sessions.

tap⌃Space

Double-Tap to Record

Double-tap a modifier key to start. Quick activation without reaching for a chord.

double⇧⇧

Auto Mode

Always listening. Voice activity detection chops your speech into utterances and pastes them as you go.

VAD

Language, your way

Speaks how you speak. Spells how you spell.

Most dictation engines output American English by default and call it done. DuckType romanises CJK scripts, corrects to your regional spelling, and learns the words you use that the model has never heard of.

Romanization

Japanese, Chinese, Korean, both ways.

Get the original script and the Latin transliteration side by side.

東京tōkyōRomaji
你好世界nǐ hǎo shì jièPinyin
한국han gugRevised
Regional spelling

British. Swiss. European Portuguese.

Pick the variant. The model output is rewritten to match.

color→colour
analyze→analyse
bebê→bebé
straße→strasse
Your vocabulary

Names. Acronyms. The thing your team renamed last week.

Add words to a dictionary list and DuckType stops getting them wrong. Multiple lists for different contexts.

+ TanStack
+ Cloudflare Workers
+ ducktype
+ Acme Industries

Skills, chained

Transcription is the boring part.

What lands at your cursor doesn't have to be the raw transcript. Stack skills on top: clean filler words, translate to French, format as a commit message, write Markdown bullets. They run in one pass.

One pass

You said

um yeah so basically what i'm thinking is we should ship the flag tomorrow and then keep an eye on the dashboards

Cleaned

We should ship the flag tomorrow and then keep an eye on the dashboards.

Formatted as commit

feat(rollout): ship feature flag tomorrow Monitor dashboards after rollout.

  • Polish, fix grammar, drop filler
  • Translate to any language
  • Format as code, commits, JSON

Skills are just prompts you save once and trigger by shortcut. Bring your own model, or use the cloud tier. Local models run for free.

What it does

The boring list of features.

The opinionated stuff is above. This is what's in the box.

Offline mode

Run a local Whisper, Parakeet, or SenseVoice model on-device. No network, no cloud bill, no audio leaves your Mac.

Bring your own key

Plug in OpenAI, Groq, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Mistral, or Cloudflare keys and pay providers directly. Free with your own key.

100+ languages

Switch language with a shortcut. Mid-sentence code-switching is fine. The transcript holds whatever you actually said.

Undo on the spot

Misfire? One shortcut deletes the last paste cleanly. No copy buffer pollution, no dangling text.

Dictation history

Every transcript is saved on disk. Search, replay, copy again, or pipe to a script. Local files, plain Markdown.

CLI and Claude Code skill

A ducktype CLI for transcribing files, plus a Claude Code skill so coding agents can listen too. For when typing is the slow path.

Stop typing. Start talking.

Free with local models or your own API key. Cloud transcription is a paid add-on, never required.

Download for macOS
Other platforms