voxtype — local voice dictation that types where your cursor is

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 — the toggle hotkey can't be suppressed there (it leaks into your text), there is no overlay, and it is untested. On Apple Silicon (M1 or later) it defaults to the parakeet-mlx Apple-GPU engine; Intel Macs use the parakeet CPU engine.

Install

uv tool install voxtype

That's it. The install includes the best engine for your machine — the Apple-GPU parakeet-mlx engine on Apple Silicon (best accuracy AND speed), the CPU parakeet engine everywhere else — and that engine is the runtime default too, so no flags are needed.

Or run without installing: uvx voxtype. (No uv? pipx install voxtype works too.)

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.
• Or go hands-free. 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 floating waveform pill appears ONLY while recording — red waves as you speak. Pill on screen = mic live; no pill = not listening.
• Nothing is ever lost. Dictated into the wrong window? A paste-again hotkey re-types the last session's transcript at the cursor; optional clipboard mirroring too. Escape cancels a recording outright.

Quick start

1. Install (see above), then grant your terminal Microphone, Accessibility, and Input Monitoring permissions (System Settings → Privacy & Security) when prompted.

2. Start dictating:

   voxtype --segmentation hold
   

   Press Ctrl+;, speak (watch the waveform pill), press Ctrl+; again — the whole take types at your cursor. Esc cancels a take.

3. Make it yours: 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.) After that, plain voxtype starts with your settings.

Hotkey & voice vocabulary

Not sure how to spell a chord? Run voxtype hotkey, press the combo you want, and it prints the exact line to put in your config (e.g. hotkey = "<ctrl>+;").

Engines

Agent skill (Claude Code + Codex)

voxtype skill installs a guide skill into both Claude Code and Codex (from the cctools-plugins marketplace), so you can just ask your agent "help me install voxtype" and it walks you through everything:

voxtype skill

It sets up whichever of the two agents is on your machine and skips the other.

Documentation

Full reference — every config key with its default, the engine comparison, and all CLI flags: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/voxtype/

History

voxtype previously shipped as voice-type inside claude-code-tools. It still reads a legacy ~/.config/voice-type/config.toml and reuses the old ~/.cache/voice-type model cache, so upgrading is seamless.

MIT license.