Everything DeftNib does
The whole machine. Free from the first minute.
Pro does not unlock a single feature: it lifts the weekly word limit and nothing else. Everything on this page is in the free download, and you can be trying all of it five minutes from now.
- Spoken correctionsSay "sorry, Thursday" and only Thursday stays.
- Spanish punctuationOpening marks, voseo and work Spanglish, spelled right.
- Hands-free modeDouble tap, talk for as long as you need, silence inserts.
- Personal dictionaryYour names and your jargon, learned without being taught.
- SnippetsSay a name and the whole block goes in, verbatim.
- History with searchEvery dictation, with what it heard and what it changed.
- Numbers, dates and URLsAn address comes out as an address, a list as bullets.
- Per-app profilesEvery text field on your Mac, with profiles for chat, email and the terminal.
The workflow
Hold. Talk. Let go. You already know the whole app.
No window to open, nothing to copy and paste. The text lands in the field you were already working in, and that is the entire learning curve.
- fnheld downStep 1
Hold your key down
Whichever one you pick in the setup assistant. Most people use fn. It works in any app, wherever you are, without switching windows.
- Step 2
Talk the way you talk
With filler words, correcting yourself halfway through, listing things, mixing English into Spanish. The capsule shows a waveform that moves with your voice, never the text, so you can talk without watching yourself type.
- Step 3
Should we move the meeting to Thursday?
Let go and the text is there
Clean, punctuated and pasted where your cursor was. If you listed things, it comes out as bullets. If you corrected yourself, the good version is what stayed. If you dictated an email address, it came out as an email address.
Before and after
It writes what you meant, not what you said.
These pairs are real. They come from the file of cases the app's quality evaluation runs against on every change to the pipeline, not from a demo assembled for this page. If one of them stopped being true, a test would fail before a visitor ever saw it.
You said
“should we move the meeting to Thursday”
It wrote
Should we move the meeting to Thursday?
Punctuation, including the question mark you did not say
You said
“The meeting is Friday sorry Thursday at three”
It wrote
The meeting is Thursday at three.
You corrected yourself out loud and the good version is what stayed
You said
“The problem is that what I actually think is that Redis is timing out”
It wrote
What I actually think is that Redis is timing out.
The false start is gone, the sentence is untouched
And the part nobody else does
The first dictation app that gets Spanish right.
Every app on the market treats Spanish as one of a hundred languages in a list. That means no opening question marks, flattened Rioplatense verbs, and the English words that live inside a Spanish speaker's working vocabulary coming out as whatever sounded closest. DeftNib treats it as the main case.
You said
“qué te pareció la demo de ayer”
It wrote
¿Qué te pareció la demo de ayer?
The opening question mark, where it belongs
You said
“acordate de pushear los cambios antes de irte”
It wrote
Acordate de pushear los cambios antes de irte.
Voseo and work Spanglish, kept the way you say them
You said
“che o sea me parece que el partido de mañana viste lo tendríamos que mover para el sábado”
It wrote
Me parece que el partido de mañana lo tendríamos que mover para el sábado.
Fillers out, the sentence intact
You said
“creá una brunch nueva y después hay que merchear los cambios a main”
It wrote
Creá una branch nueva y después hay que mergear los cambios a main.
Work Spanglish, spelled the way it is spelled
You said
“mi mail es laura punto gimenez arroba ondasur punto com”
It wrote
Mi mail es laura.gimenez@ondasur.com.
A dictated address comes out as an address
You said
“para el release hay que actualizar el changelog correr los tests y avisarle al equipo de soporte”
It wrote
Para el release hay que: - Actualizar el changelog - Correr los tests - Avisarle al equipo de soporte
You listed things without saying the word list, and it came out as bullets
The full pipeline runs in English and Spanish. In the other languages your Mac supports you get Apple's native transcription, which already punctuates and capitalizes well in its own languages, plus your dictionary and your snippets. We say so plainly because the cleanup engine is calibrated on English and Spanish vocabulary, and pointing it at French would do subtle damage instead of good.
Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or later. Free up to 4,000 words a week, no account.
Beyond dictation
The tools that turn dictation into a habit.
Talking is the first minute. These four are what you keep using at minute ten thousand. All of them are in the free download, and none of them needs a server, an account, or a setup step you will notice.
Talk for a minute, or ten, without holding a key.
Double tap, talk, and silence inserts. For everything that does not fit in one breath.
The capsule widens and shows the elapsed time and the icon of the app the text will land in. Fifteen seconds of silence closes it and inserts; the last five show up as a ring emptying out, so carrying on talking is enough to keep it open.
Recording hands free: no key held, silence closes it
A dictionary that learns your names and your jargon.
Tailscale, Ferreyra, kubectl: after a few tries the capsule offers to remember them. One click, and it is spelled your way from then on.
When a word the app does not know keeps coming back, the capsule offers to add it. One click to review it, Esc to skip. It never logs your keystrokes, and the only text it reads back is what it just wrote, to notice a correction. What it stores is single words and counters, never sentences.
➜ infra git:(main)
git commit -m "tailscale healthcheck timeout"
[main 4e2f1c9] tailscale healthcheck timeout
Add “Tailscale” to your dictionary?
Heard 4 times as “tail scale”
Say the name. The whole block goes in.
Your signature, your address, your meeting link, the command you type ten times a day.
It is inserted verbatim, with your capitals and your line breaks, so a shell one liner dictated into the terminal comes out runnable. It is a local lookup: zero milliseconds and zero language model.
Every dictation, and exactly what the app changed.
Search everything you ever said. Unfold what it heard, see what it fixed, and teach its dictionary in one click.
Turn history on and every dictation is saved, grouped by day, with the final text on the right. Unfold "what I heard" and you get the recognizer's raw output with the words the pipeline changed highlighted: the filler it dropped, the name it repaired. Select a misheard word and you add it to your dictionary right there.
Today
Hi Ana, quick update on the migration: Tailscale is set up on the three servers and the demo is ready for Thursday.
What I heard
hi ana eh quick update on the migration the the tail scale is set up on the three servers…
Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or later. Free up to 4,000 words a week, no account.
Use cases
One shortcut. Every text field on your Mac.
DeftNib is not an app you open: it is a key that works wherever your cursor already is. These are the places where it pays for itself.
Prompting AI, at the speed you think
A good prompt is three paragraphs of context, and nobody types three paragraphs into Claude or Cursor for the fourth time today. Say it. Corrections and half-formed starts get cleaned on the way in.
Email and Slack, cleared at talking speed
Replies are the writing you already know how to say. Dictate the answer, watch it land punctuated, hit send, next. A morning of follow-ups stops being typing work.
First drafts, notes and docs
The blank page problem is a typing problem: you can say the messy version of anything. Talk the draft into Notion or Notes, then edit. Editing is the part keyboards are actually good at.
Code, commits and the terminal
Commit messages, PR descriptions, code review comments. And snippets insert verbatim, capitals and line breaks included, so a dictated shell one-liner comes out runnable.
Work you could not send to a cloud
A patient's chart, a client's case, an unreleased deal. Cloud dictation is off the table the moment the sentence is confidential. Here the sentence never leaves the machine, so there is nothing to clear with compliance.
Both of your languages, even mixed
Spanish with voseo and opening question marks, English, and the Spanglish in between: "pushear" and "mergear" spelled the way your team spells them. No other dictation app treats Spanish as a main case.
Anywhere you can type, you can speak. If an app should never hear you, like a password manager or a DAW, you exclude it once and DeftNib stays out.
Free vs Pro
Side by side, so there are no surprises.
Pro lifts the volume limit. That is all it does. The list is long on purpose: it is the only way to make it believable that nothing is switched off waiting for you to pay.
| Free | ProUS$ 49 once | |
|---|---|---|
| Words per week | 4,000, resets on Mondays | No limit |
| Push to talk dictation | Yes | Yes |
| Hands free, nothing to hold | Yes | Yes |
| Filler words and repeats removed | Yes | Yes |
| Punctuation, including Spanish opening marks | Yes | Yes |
| Corrections you say out loud | Yes | Yes |
| Lists when you enumerate without saying so | Yes | Yes |
| Repair of misheard words | Yes | Yes |
| Numbers, dates, times and URLs | Yes | Yes |
| Dictated email addresses | Yes | Yes |
| Personal dictionary | Yes | Yes |
| Dictionary that learns on its own | Yes | Yes |
| Snippets | Yes | Yes |
| History with search | Yes | Yes |
| See what the app heard and what it changed | Yes | Yes |
| Every language your Mac supports | Yes | Yes |
| Quick language switching | Yes | Yes |
| Per app profiles | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic updates | Yes | Yes |
| Works with no internet | Yes | Yes |
| Account required | Never | Never |
| Macs | Any Mac, nothing to activate | 3 per license |
The free plan does not expire and does not ask for an account. The word counter is a file on your Mac: nobody on this end knows how much you dictated.
Try it with your own voice. It is the only thing that convinces.
Download it, install it, talk. No account, no email, no card. If a week later you are not using it, you lost nothing. If you are using it every day, that is when Pro starts making sense.
Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or later. Free up to 4,000 words a week, no account.
Questions before you download? Write to support@deftnib.com and the person who wrote the code answers.