spellsafe
For a lot of people, the hard part of writing isn’t having something to say. It’s getting it onto the page. If you have dyslexia, every word you’re unsure how to spell is a small interruption. If you have ADHD, the gap between thinking a sentence and finishing typing it is often long enough to lose the next one.
Speaking closes that gap. You can say a paragraph in the time it takes to type a sentence, and you never have to stop to work out how a word is spelled.
Why dictation helps
- No spelling while you think. You say the word, and it’s spelled correctly. You can use the vocabulary you actually have, not just the words you’re confident spelling.
- Ideas come out at the speed you have them. Talking is roughly three times faster than typing for most people, so less of your thought gets lost on the way.
- Drafting and editing become separate jobs. Say everything first, tidy it later. Many people find that much easier than trying to write perfect sentences one at a time.
- Less blank-page paralysis. It’s often easier to explain something out loud than to start typing it.
Getting started with spellsafe
spellsafe is a dictation app for Mac that types into any app: Google Docs, Word, Pages, email, Notion, chat and your browser.
- Click where you want to write.
- Hold Right Option and talk. When you let go, everything you said is typed at once. This is the easiest way to start, because you don’t have to watch words appear while you’re thinking.
- If you like seeing words as you go, tap Right Option instead, and tap again to stop.
Tidying up without retyping
The biggest worry with dictation is that the draft comes out messy. spellsafe has a few ways to clean it up without going back to the keyboard:
- Clean up with AI on release. Turn this on in Settings, and “um”s, “uh”s and self-corrections are removed before the text is typed. “Let’s meet Monday, no, Tuesday” becomes “Let’s meet Tuesday.”
- “Scratch that” removes the last sentence. “Replace Monday with Tuesday” changes a word.
- Command mode. Select a paragraph, hold Right Command, and say what you want: “fix the typos”, “make this clearer”, “turn this into a list”, “make this more formal”. It’s rewritten where it is, and ⌘Z undoes it if you don’t like it.
- Spell a word out when you need to. In command mode, “replace Jon with J O H N” spells a word exactly, even if the speech model heard it differently.
Words it gets wrong, fixed for good
Every dictation tool has words it struggles with: friends’ names, course names, technical terms. In spellsafe you add them once in Vocabulary, along with what they sound like, and they’re spelled your way from then on.
Texting style
If your messages are usually lowercase, turn on “Don’t capitalize sentence starts” in Settings, or tap or hold ⌥/ (Option and the ? key) to dictate just one message in lowercase. “I”, names and app names still keep their capitals.
Private by design
Writing tools hear a lot of personal things: messages, journal entries, assignments, work email. spellsafe recognises speech on your Mac, so your voice is never uploaded. The AI cleanup runs on your Mac too. There’s no account, no analytics, and after a one-time model download it works offline.
Limits to know about
- English only, for now.
- Apple silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later. It needs about 450 MB for speech recognition and about 2.3 GB more for the AI cleanup model.
- It doesn’t read text aloud. For text-to-speech, macOS has Spoken Content built in (System Settings › Accessibility › Spoken Content), and it pairs well with dictation for checking what you wrote.
- If you need formal assistive technology for school or work, check whether your institution has approved tools or funding for them.
Try it
spellsafe has a 7-day free trial with every feature, then costs $9 a year. Download spellsafe.