spellsafe
Repetitive strain injury, carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis all have one thing in common: the more you type, the worse it gets. Ergonomic keyboards, breaks and physiotherapy help, but if your job is writing, the keystrokes still have to come from somewhere.
Dictation can take most of them off your hands. This guide covers how to make voice typing a real part of your day on a Mac, not something you try once and give up on.
This isn’t medical advice. If you have pain, numbness or weakness in your hands, see a doctor or physiotherapist.
Where dictation helps most
The goal with RSI is to cut the number of keystrokes, especially the repetitive ones. The things that make dictation painful are usually the things that send you back to the keyboard:
- Fixing mistakes. If you have to reach for the mouse and keyboard every time a word is wrong, you haven’t saved much.
- Names and jargon. Words the dictation keeps getting wrong are the ones you retype every day.
- Punctuation and formatting. Adding commas, new lines and lists by hand.
- Sending and navigating. Pressing Return, switching tabs, scrolling.
spellsafe handles each of these by voice.
Setting up spellsafe for fewer keystrokes
One key to start. Tap Right Option to start live dictation and tap again to stop, or hold it while you talk and let go to type it all at once. You can also use ⌃⌥D. If even one key is uncomfortable, assign a shortcut that suits you in Settings. A foot pedal or a large programmable button that sends that shortcut works too.
Fix by voice, not by keyboard.
- “Scratch that” removes the last sentence.
- “Delete last word” removes the last word.
- “Replace Tuesday with Wednesday” changes a word you just said.
- “Select that”, then keep talking, to replace the last sentence.
- Hold Right Command, say “fix the typos” or “make this more formal”, and the selected text, or the whole field, is rewritten in place.
Teach it your words once. In Vocabulary, add colleagues’ names, product names and jargon. They’re spelled your way from then on, so you stop correcting the same words.
Let it handle punctuation. Turn on “Clean up with AI on release” and hold-to-talk dictation comes out with fillers and self-corrections removed. Spacing and capitals follow what’s already in the field, and spoken numbers are typed as digits.
Do the small chores by voice.
- “New line” and “new paragraph”.
- “Press enter” types your text and presses Return, so you can send a chat message hands-free.
- “Open Mail”, “switch to Slack”, “new tab”, “switch to tab Gmail”, “scroll down”.
Building the habit
Most people who give up on dictation do so in the first week, because speaking text feels unnatural at first. A few things help:
- Start with messages and email. Short, conversational writing is the easiest to dictate.
- Use hold-to-talk for longer thoughts. Say a whole paragraph, let go, and it’s typed at once. You don’t have to watch the words appear.
- Don’t edit as you go. Get the draft out by voice, then use command mode to tidy it.
- Check your progress. The Stats page shows how many words you’ve dictated and the typing time you’ve saved. Those are keystrokes your hands didn’t have to make.
Privacy, since you’ll be dictating everything
If dictation becomes your main way of writing, it will hear everything: emails, messages, documents and passwords you say out loud by mistake. spellsafe recognises speech on your Mac, so none of it is uploaded. There’s no account, no analytics, and after the one-time model download it works offline. It also ignores key presses while a password field is active.
Limits to know about
- It isn’t a full hands-free system. It types, edits and handles common actions like switching apps, tabs and scrolling, but it doesn’t click arbitrary buttons or menus. You still need a key press (or a pedal or button mapped to the shortcut) to start dictating.
- English only, for now.
- Apple silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later.
Try it
spellsafe has a 7-day free trial with every feature, then costs $9 a year. Download spellsafe.