Why Voiacast

We built dictation we’d actually use.

That’s the short version. The long version is more honest about why the short version took so long.

Most of us speak faster than we type. We’ve all known that for years. Phones figured it out. Cars figured it out. The thing we sit in front of all day, the thing we type the most into, didn’t.

The dictation that came with our Macs felt like a feature waiting for permission to leave beta. The web tools felt like dictation built by people who don’t dictate. We tried them all. We came back to the keyboard.

So we wrote down what we wanted, in plain English, and refused to ship anything that didn’t fit.

What we wanted

A hotkey. One hotkey. Hold it, talk, let go. Words land in whatever field the cursor was already in — the email, the code editor, the search bar, the chat window. No new app to switch into. No paste step. No microphone permissions dance every other Tuesday.

We wanted it to be quick. Not “quick for software” — quick the way a shortcut is quick. The kind of quick where you stop noticing the tool and only notice the words appearing.

We wanted it to be private. By default, nothing leaves the Mac. Not the audio, not the transcript, not a usage ping. If you decide you want a bigger model in the cloud someday, that’s your call and your key. The default is your Mac, full stop.

We wanted it to be honest. No accounts, no email lists, no “free trial converts to subscription on day eight.” A version that’s free forever for most people, and a paid version for people who type for a living. That’s it.

Who it’s for

Two kinds of people show up over and over.

The first writes for a living, or close to it. Email all morning, documents all afternoon, a long Slack thread at 4 p.m. Their hands ache by Wednesday. Two thousand keystrokes shaved off a day adds up to a wrist that still works on Saturday.

The second writes code. They’ve memorised every shortcut their editor ships. They still have to type the words around the code — the commit message, the PR description, the design doc, the reply to their manager. They want a second input that doesn’t cost them context.

It turns out those two crowds want the same thing. A keystroke that hands the next sentence over to their voice and gets out of the way.

How it gets paid for

The free version is the whole product for most people. We mean that — no quota, no nag, no countdown timer. If it earns a place on your keyboard, that’s a win for both of us.

For the heavier users, there’s an early-adopter price for the paid tier. €20 today, €50 once we settle. The first hundred supporters keep the early-adopter rate forever. After that, the price is the price.

We don’t take subscriptions. We don’t run a checkout team. The license arrives by email within two business days, from a real human who replies to questions in the same window. It’s a small operation on purpose — small enough that the people who paid know who took the money, and the people who took the money know who paid.

That’s the whole pitch. We’re going to keep it short, and so should the dictation.