The complete guide

Everything you can do with your voice.

You can be set up in under a minute. Hold a key, speak, release. Your words land as clean, polished text in any app.

Speak naturally — Air Wisper transcribes on-device and cleans it up before it lands

On this page


Set up in a minute

Getting started

Air Wisper lives in your menu bar — there’s no window to manage. Three quick steps and you’re dictating into any app.

01

Open Air Wisper from the menu bar

Click the icon to reach Settings or History at any time.

02

Grant permissions in Settings

Microphone, Accessibility and Speech Recognition. You’re looking for three green checkmarks.

03

Hold the hotkey and speak

Hold ⌥D, say what you mean, release. The polished text is typed where your cursor is.

The Air Wisper menu bar icon and dropdown menu on macOS
Air Wisper sits in your menu bar — click the icon to open Settings or History.

First time? In Settings, make sure Microphone, Accessibility, and Speech Recognition are all granted. Accessibility is the one that lets Air Wisper type into the app you’re already in.

Air Wisper Settings window showing the dictation shortcut, language, and speech engine options
Air Wisper’s Settings — set your shortcut, language and engine, and grant the three permissions.

Voice to text

Dictation

Hold ⌥D, speak naturally, release. Your speech is transcribed on-device, cleaned up by AI — grammar, punctuation, filler words — and typed into the active app.

The Air Wisper recording overlay transcribing speech in real time
The notch shows what it hears as you speak — then quietly cleans it up on release.
01

Apple Speech transcribes on-device

Free and private. It works with no network at all.

02

AI cleans up the text

Grammar, punctuation and filler words. Only the transcript is sent — never the audio.

03

The result is typed for you

Straight into the active app, wherever your cursor already is.

What you say

hey sarah um just wanted to follow up on like yesterday’s meeting i think we should basically move forward with the redesign

What gets typed

Hey Sarah, just wanted to follow up on yesterday’s meeting. I think we should move forward with the redesign.

Works everywhere. Slack, Mail, Notion, VS Code, your browser, any text field. No copy-paste needed — text appears right where your cursor is.


Inspiration

Real-world use cases

Dictation shines when you’re writing long-form, replying to messages, or polishing prose without breaking flow.

Someone using Air Wisper to dictate at their desk
From Slack replies to commit messages — talk it out, get clean text.

Writing & editing

Talk through a paragraph instead of typing it. The cleanup pass handles grammar and punctuation, so the draft arrives readable.

Hold ⌥D and say the paragraph you were about to write.

Messaging

Reply to Slack, iMessage or email at speaking speed. Air Wisper cleans up the grammar and punctuation as you go.

“hey can you take a look at the latest pr when you get a chance” → cleaned and typed

Note capture

Brain-dump into Notion, Apple Notes or your editor. Dictate raw thoughts and let Air Wisper turn them into readable text.

Open your notes app, hold ⌥D, talk through what’s on your mind.

Code comments & docs

Write commit messages, README sections and inline comments by voice. Faster than typing, especially for long explanations.

Dictate a commit message describing what you just changed.


Pro tips

Tips & tricks

Speak naturally

You don’t need robotic phrasing. Just talk — Air Wisper cleans up filler words and punctuation for you.

Local or cloud engine

Local is the default: faster to start and fully private. Cloud is more accurate for difficult audio. Switch in Settings depending on what you need.

Change the shortcut

Don’t like ⌥D? Set it to any combination in Settings › Shortcuts.


More from the blog

Keep reading

See how people put voice-to-text to work day to day.

6 ways developers use voice to text while coding

Code comments, commit messages, docs, Slack, AI prompts and rubber-duck debugging — all by voice.

Read →

I replaced typing with voice for a week

Seven days of dictating everything — emails, Slack, code comments, notes. Here’s what surprised me.

Read →

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