voxtype — Type with your voice

voxtype turns speech into text in whatever app has focus — your editor, browser, terminal, or a coding agent’s prompt box. Everything runs on your machine: no cloud, no accounts, no audio leaving your Mac.

macOS only — Intel and Apple Silicon

voxtype relies on macOS APIs for typing (accessibility), hotkey suppression (the CGEvent tap), and its overlay (AppKit). It is not supported on Linux or Windows — there the toggle hotkey can’t be suppressed (it leaks into your text), there is no overlay, and it is untested. On Macs it works on both Intel and Apple Silicon: Apple Silicon (M1 or later) defaults to the parakeet-mlx Apple-GPU engine; Intel Macs use the parakeet CPU engine (moonshine ships no Intel-macOS build).

Quick start

1. Install — the best engine for your machine comes bundled automatically (Apple-GPU parakeet-mlx on Apple Silicon, CPU parakeet on Intel):

   uv tool install voxtype

   Upgrade later with uv tool upgrade voxtype (it keeps any extras).

2. Grant your terminal Microphone, Accessibility, and Input Monitoring permissions (System Settings → Privacy & Security) when prompted.

3. Start dictating:

   voxtype

   Press Ctrl+; to start, speak (watch the ghost), press Ctrl+; again to stop — your speech is typed at the cursor. Esc cancels a take.

4. Configure it: run voxtype setup for an interactive walkthrough — it asks a handful of explained questions (engine, mode, hotkey, …) and writes your ~/.config/voxtype/config.toml. (Prefer editing by hand? voxtype init drops a fully commented sample instead.)

Rather have your coding agent do all of this? See Set it up from your coding agent below.

Why it’s different

One key to dictate

Hit the toggle hotkey (default Ctrl+;), speak as long as you like, hit it again — the whole take is transcribed with full sentence context and typed in one go (a single edit to undo, in most apps). No chopping at pauses; sub-second results after a one-time warmup (the first take loads the model).

Or go hands-free

Prefer no keys at all? Say “hey claude” (configurable, with alias spellings) to start dictating; say “stop listening” or go quiet to re-arm. The hotkey still works as an override.

Spoken submit

Say “go”, “over”, or “submit” as a standalone utterance and voxtype presses Enter — dictate a prompt to a coding agent and send it without touching the keyboard.

Clean transcripts

Standalone fillers (uh, um, …) are stripped and 3+ word stutters collapse (“I I I think” becomes “I think”) — on-device regex, no LLM involved.

Visible when it matters

A little glowing-blue ghost appears ONLY while recording — its mouth opens as you speak. Ghost on screen = actively recording; no ghost = not recording (paused, or waiting for the wake word).

Nothing is ever lost

Esc cancels a recording outright (the default cancel_hotkey). Two optional rescues, both off by default: bind a paste-again hotkey (paste_hotkey) to re-type the last session’s transcript at your cursor, and/or enable clipboard mirroring (copy_to_clipboard) to echo each session to the clipboard.

Set it up from your coding agent

voxtype skill installs a short guide skill into your coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, or both (each reads its own marketplace in this repo):

voxtype skill

It sets up whichever of the two agents is on your machine and skips the other. Afterwards, just ask your agent “help me install voxtype” (or “set up voice dictation”) and it walks you through uv tool install voxtype → voxtype setup → launch, including the macOS permission steps.

Make it yours

Almost everything is a choice: how dictation activates (hotkey, wake word, or always-on), how speech becomes text (whole-take vs. per-pause), which local engine runs it (Apple-GPU Parakeet, CPU Parakeet, or Moonshine), plus hotkeys, sounds, optional clipboard mirroring, and more. The complete reference — every config key with its default, the engine comparison, and all CLI flags — lives in Configuration & CLI.

Hotkey & voice vocabulary

Action	Default	Configurable as
Toggle recording	Ctrl+;	hotkey
Cancel recording (discard)	Esc (only while recording)	cancel_hotkey
Re-type last transcript	off	paste_hotkey
Submit (press Enter)	say “go” / “over” / “submit”	submit_phrases
Stop dictating (vad segmentation)	say “stop listening”	stop_phrase

In the default toggle + hold setup you stop by pressing the toggle hotkey again; the spoken stop_phrase only applies to per-utterance (vad) transcription — i.e. wake mode or segmentation = "vad".

Not sure how to spell a chord for the hotkey settings above? Run voxtype hotkey, press the combo you want, and it prints a ready-to-paste hotkey = "..." line (use the same chord string for cancel_hotkey / paste_hotkey).

Full reference: Configuration & CLI.