Voice typing for Slack, email and Jira on Mac

If you manage a product, a team or a company, most of your writing isn’t documents. It’s Slack replies, emails, ticket descriptions, comments and status updates, dozens of them a day. Each one is small, but together they’re hours of typing.

Those are exactly the things that are quickest to say out loud. The trick is getting dictation to behave in each app: not sending a Slack message halfway through, not adding a stray full stop to a ticket title, and not leaving “um” in an email to a customer.

What makes dictation awkward in work apps

• Return sends the message. In Slack, Teams and most chat apps, a new line typed the wrong way sends a half-written message.
• Formatting depends on the field. A ticket title or a bullet point shouldn’t end with a full stop. A sentence in the middle of a paragraph shouldn’t start with a capital.
• Names and jargon. Colleagues’ names, product names, acronyms and ticket keys trip up most speech recognition.
• Tone. What you say out loud is more casual than what you’d send to a client.

How spellsafe handles each app

spellsafe is a dictation app for Mac that types into whichever app has focus. Hold Right Option, talk, and let go; or tap it to see words appear as you speak.

Chat apps (Slack, Teams, Discord, iMessage)

• “New line” is typed as Shift-Return, so it adds a line break instead of sending.
• “Press enter” types your text and presses Return, so you can reply hands-free.
• If you write in lowercase in chat, tap or hold ⌥/ to dictate one message without capitals at sentence starts, or turn on “Don’t capitalize sentence starts” in Settings. “I”, names and app names keep their capitals.

Ticket trackers and forms (Jira, Linear, GitHub issues)

• In a one-line field like a ticket title or a search box, a single sentence is typed without a closing full stop.
• On a bullet or numbered line, the same applies, so lists look like lists. Say “period” if you do want one.

Documents and email (Gmail, Outlook, Google Docs, Notion)

• Spacing and capitals follow what’s already there. Start mid-sentence and the first word isn’t capitalised; start after a full stop and it is.
• Turn on “Clean up with AI on release” and fillers and self-corrections are removed before the text is typed.

Changing the tone before you hit send

Command mode is where this gets useful for work. Select a draft (or leave nothing selected to use the whole field), hold Right Command, and say what to change:

• “Make this more formal” before it goes to a customer.
• “Make this shorter” for a status update.
• “Turn it into a list” for meeting notes.
• “Fix the typos”.

The rewrite is done by a language model on your Mac and typed over the original, so ⌘Z undoes it.

Getting around by voice

Between messages, you can switch context without reaching for the trackpad:

• “Switch to Slack”, “open Mail”, “open Linear”.
• “Switch to tab Gmail”, “next tab”, “new tab”.
• “Switch to the work profile” brings up your work Chrome profile.
• “Scroll down”, “scroll to the top”.

Names, acronyms and product terms

Add your team’s names, product names and acronyms in Vocabulary, with what they sound like if they’re unusual. From then on they’re spelled your way, and the AI cleanup is given the spellings too, so it doesn’t “correct” them back.

Why on-device matters at work

Work messages are full of things you wouldn’t want on a third party’s servers: customer names, deal terms, hiring discussions, unreleased plans. Cloud dictation apps upload your audio to transcribe it, in every app you dictate into.

spellsafe recognises speech on your Mac with NVIDIA’s Parakeet model, and runs its AI cleanup locally too. Nothing is uploaded, there’s no account and no analytics, and after a one-time model download it works offline. That also makes it easier to get past an IT or security review, because there’s no data processor to assess.

Limits to know about

• English only, for now.
• Apple silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later.
• Command mode works on up to 4,000 characters at a time without a selection; select the part you want for longer fields.

Try it

spellsafe has a 7-day free trial with every feature, then costs $9 a year. Download spellsafe.