Talk instead of typing: Dictate is here
By The Assistly team ·
Most of what you type in a day is not writing. It's a Slack reply, a line in a ticket, an email that says the thing you'd say if the person were in the room. You know exactly what you mean; the keyboard is just in the way.
Dictate takes the keyboard out of it. Hold ⌃⌥ (Control and Option, or Ctrl+Alt on Windows), say it, let go. The words land where your cursor is.
It types what you meant, not what you said
Speech has ums and false starts and "Tuesday — no, Wednesday". Nobody wants those in a message, and nobody wants to go back and fix them either. Dictate cleans up on the way in:
- Filler and stutters go. "I I think we we should, um, ship it" becomes "I think we should ship it."
- Spoken corrections are applied, not transcribed. "Tuesday, no, Wednesday" inserts just "Wednesday". "Scratch that" discards what came before it.
- Punctuation and capitalisation arrive on their own. So do paragraph breaks when you change subject.
- When you count things off, you get a list. Say "a few things: first, how much time would it take, second, how much manpower, third, do we have the bandwidth" and this is what lands:
Hey, I just wanted to check a few things:
- How much time would it take?
- How much manpower would it take?
- Do we have enough bandwidth?
- Numbers come out the way you'd type them: "four thousand two hundred dollars" is $4,200, "three pm" is 3pm, "march fifth" is March 5.
- A web address is a web address. "assistly dot com" is assistly.com, and it never gets a period stuck to the end that turns it into a broken link.
- Spoken formatting is obeyed, not echoed: "new line", "new paragraph", "question mark", "bullet point". Ask for a "thumbs up" and you get 👍.
Your words stay your words. Dictate is an editor, not a writer: it never paraphrases, never adds a sentence you didn't say, and if what came back drifts from what you said, you get the plain transcript instead.
It goes where your cursor is
Dictate types into whatever has focus — the Slack composer, a Gmail draft, a code editor, a terminal, a browser form. It doesn't paste, so your clipboard is untouched, and it doesn't take focus, so the app you were in stays in front. In every app, on Mac and Windows.
Ask Assistly out loud
You've always been able to type a question into Assistly, or press ⌘↵ and let it answer whatever is on your screen. Now there's a third way, and it's the same chord. Hold it with nothing focused — you're looking at a web page, you're on a call, you're on the desktop — and your words go to Assistly as a question. The answer appears in the overlay, no typing involved. Say "what does this error mean" over your editor and you get an answer about the error on your screen.
One gesture, two outcomes, and it picks the right one from where you are: a text field means "type this", anything else means "answer this".
Hands-free for the long ones
Holding two keys through a paragraph is a chore, so you don't have to: tap the chord twice and it stays on until you press it again. Talk through the whole email, then finish.
Fast enough to forget
The moment you let go is the only moment you wait, so that moment is where the work went. The microphone opens the instant the chord goes down, the transcript is final within about a tenth of a second of release, and the cleanup rides a connection that's already open. A small pill near the bottom of the screen shows live audio bars while it listens, a soft note plays when it's ready for you and another when the text lands, and a spinner while it tidies up. Nothing to watch, nothing to click.
Where to find it
Dictate is on for everyone, Free and Pro, in the current release. The chord is ⌃⌥ on Mac and Ctrl+Alt on Windows (rebind it under Keybinds if it clashes with something), and the one switch — on or off — lives in your account menu under General. On macOS it uses the Accessibility permission the hotkeys already have.
Hold the keys, say the thing, let go.