About

Talking is how thinking sounds

Dictave exists because of a gap you stop noticing until it is gone: your thoughts move at speaking pace, and your hands do not.

The itch

Watch yourself compose a difficult message. The sentence is already finished in your head — whole, with its rhythm and its point — and then you spend thirty seconds transcribing yourself, and somewhere in the typing the rhythm goes and the point dulls. Everyone who writes for a living knows this feeling. Most people have simply made peace with it.

We didn’t want to make peace with it. We wanted to hold a key, say the sentence, and keep moving.

The refusal

Dictation already existed, of course. But it came with a bargain nobody says out loud: to have your words typed for you, you send your voice — half-formed thoughts, unsent messages, names of people you love, things you would never put in a search box — to somebody else’s computers, and trust a promise that it will be handled nicely.

We think that bargain is absurd, and more importantly, unnecessary. Your own computer is astonishingly capable. It can hear you, understand you, and type for you — all by itself, with the network cable conceptually unplugged. So that is the product: the whole thing happens on your machine, and nothing you say goes anywhere.

Promises as architecture

A privacy policy is a promise about behaviour. We prefer promises about ability. Dictave is built so that the app you install has no way to send your voice anywhere — not a setting that is off, but a capability that is absent — and an automatic check refuses to produce a release if that ever stops being true. The same discipline runs through everything else: accuracy is measured against the same recordings before every release and is not allowed to get worse; speed is a budget we hold ourselves to, not an adjective.

This is slower than the other way of building software. It is also the only way the sentence “nothing you say goes anywhere” gets to be a fact rather than a hope.

The craft

We care about the second-to-second feel of the thing: that it never steals your typing focus, that it tells you honestly what it is doing — listening, thinking, typing — and then gets out of the way, that it is a real Mac app that behaves the way your other Mac apps behave. Windows and Linux are being built with the same stubbornness, as real native applications, and they will arrive when they are worth using and not before.

Write to us

We read everything — ideas, complaints, the word you dictated that came out wrong.