VoiceMerge
Dictation for Mac and iPhone

Say it once,
it lands everywhere.

Talk, and clean text appears where you're writing. Say what needs doing, and it becomes tasks in the tools you already use. Record a meeting and get the note. Speech never leaves your device unless you say so.

macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon. Free. No account needed.

Listening — holding Right ⌥ in Mail
What you said
What was typed
Speech: on this Mac Cleanup: on this Mac Mode: formal (Mail)
What it does

Five things you can do with your voice

One app, one hold key on the Mac, one mic button on the iPhone. The mode decides what happens to the words.

Dictate

Hold, speak, release. Fillers and false starts are gone, sentences are fixed, and the tone matches where you're writing — casual in Slack, formal in Mail, verbatim in the terminal.

"um so can we uh move the call to thursday, actually no friday"

Edit

Select some text, hold the edit key, say how to change it. The edited version replaces the selection.

"make it friendlier and change Tuesday to Thursday"

Distill

Explain something out loud for two minutes. Review a short, ordered version before it goes anywhere.

Five minutes of thinking → a brief you'd send

Tasks

Say what needs doing. Dates, tags and people stay with the task they were said with. Review, then copies go to Reminders, Obsidian, Microsoft To Do, ClickUp or Notion.

"call John about the invoice Friday, and ping design for the mockups"

Meetings

Record a call or a room. Speakers are told apart, each turn transcribed, and you get a Markdown note with a summary. On the Mac it hears both sides of the call.

Note lands in ~/Documents/VoiceMerge Meetings

It knows where you are

Modes are keyed on the app — and on the Mac, on the site too. Formal in mail.google.com, technical on a GitHub pull request, your own prompt anywhere you like. Your names and terms come along in a personal dictionary.

Where your words go

Private by default. Cloud by choice.

Speech-to-text always runs on the device. For the cleanup pass you pick one of three paths, and every dictation shows which one ran.

Default · Free

On your device

Parakeet or Whisper for speech, a small local model for cleanup — on the Mac's Neural Engine, or Apple Intelligence on the iPhone. Works on a plane.

  • Nothing leaves the device
  • No account
  • Good for most dictation
Your keys

Your own API keys

Already have an Anthropic, OpenAI or Groq account? Paste a key. It's stored in the Keychain and the app talks to them directly.

  • Their bill, their terms
  • No VoiceMerge account needed
  • Screen context never goes remote
Credits

Claude through VoiceMerge

Sign in with Apple, buy a credit pack, and cleanup, editing, Distill and meeting summaries run on Claude. You pay for what you use, and the ledger shows every request.

  • Haiku for cleanup, Sonnet for the rest — or pick better
  • Only the text of a request is sent
  • Not used for training
Mac and iPhone

Same words, same dictionary, both devices

Mac

A menu bar app. Hold a key anywhere — any app, any text field — and the text is typed at the cursor when you let go.

  • Hold Right ⌥ to dictate, Right ⌃ to edit, fn to Distill, Left ⌃ for tasks. All changeable.
  • Quick-tap to lock hands-free; Esc cancels.
  • Live preview while you speak; optionally type words as you go.
  • Modes per app and per site. Personal dictionary and text replacements.
  • Meetings capture the mic and what the Mac plays (macOS 14.2+).
  • Searchable history on your disk. Delete it whenever you like.

iPhone

Tap, speak, stop. The clean text is copied — or inserted into any app through the VoiceMerge keyboard.

  • The VoiceMerge keyboard: a mic button in every app. It opens VoiceMerge to listen and pastes the result when you come back.
  • Start from the Action Button, a Shortcut, or Siri.
  • Dictate, Edit (from the clipboard), Distill, Tasks, Meetings.
  • Apple's on-device speech, or Parakeet and Whisper if you prefer.
  • Same task list and dictionary as the Mac.

Coming to the App Store. The keyboard needs Full Access to receive text from the app; it has no network code.

Pricing

Free to use. Pay only for the cloud you choose.

VoiceMerge

$0

Everything on the device. No account, no subscription, no trial that ends.

  • Dictate, Edit, Distill, Tasks, Meetings
  • Local speech and local cleanup
  • Bring your own API keys if you want
Download for Mac

VoiceMerge credits

Pay as you go · no subscription

Claude through VoiceMerge. A typical dictation costs a fraction of a cent; a meeting summary a few cents.

$5starter
$10most people
$20heavy use
  • Buy in the app (App Store) or on the web
  • Optional auto-refill when you run low
  • A ledger of every request and what it cost
  • Have a code? Redeem it in the app for free credit
Buy credits on the web
Questions

Things people ask

Does anything leave my computer?

Not unless you choose it. Speech-to-text is always local. Cleanup is local by default. If you add your own API key or buy credits, the text of a request goes to that provider — never the audio, never the screen context.

How good is the on-device cleanup?

Good for ordinary dictation: fillers, punctuation, sentence fixes, matching tone. It's a small model, so long Distill and meeting summaries are where Claude is noticeably better. The app tells you which path ran on every dictation so you can judge for yourself.

Why credits instead of a subscription?

Most people never need the cloud tier, and those who do use it unevenly. Credits mean a $10 pack lasts months for light use, and the ledger shows exactly where it went. You can turn on auto-refill if you'd rather not think about it.

What happens to my old dictations?

They stay in a history file on your device. Search it, re-clean an entry, copy the raw words, delete one or all. Turn history off and nothing is kept.

Which languages?

Parakeet handles English and 24 other European languages. Whisper covers around 99. Cleanup follows the language you spoke.

Is it open source?

The apps and the API are on GitHub. The credit service is the part we run so you don't have to manage keys.