Introducing JustSpeak

Today we're launching JustSpeak, and I want to tell you why we built it.

For years, the fastest way to get words out of my head and onto the screen was also the most frustrating. I think in full sentences, but I type in fits and starts — hunting for keys, fixing typos, losing the thread halfway through a paragraph. The keyboard was never the bottleneck for thinking. It was the bottleneck for saying.

We tried the built-in dictation tools. They were fine for a text message and useless for real work: no punctuation sense, no memory of the words we actually use, and a habit of shipping our audio off to someone else's servers. So we built the thing we wanted instead.

What JustSpeak is

JustSpeak is voice to text for macOS. Press a shortcut, talk, and your words appear — cleaned up and formatted — in whatever app you're already using. Email, your editor, Slack, a terminal, a form on a website. There's no separate window to copy out of. The text lands where your cursor already is.

Under the hood it's not just transcription. JustSpeak understands that "new paragraph" is a command, that "um" and "you know" are filler to drop, and that the messy first pass you spoke out loud is not the sentence you actually wanted to write. It gives you the clean version.

Private by default

This is the part we care about most. JustSpeak's local models run entirely on your Mac — your voice never leaves the device. No Wi-Fi, no problem: dictation works on a plane, in a basement, anywhere.

When you choose a cloud model for extra accuracy, your audio is processed and immediately discarded — never stored, never used to train anything. That's not a setting you have to find and flip. It's the default, and it's a promise we won't quietly change.

Built for how you actually work

A few things we sweated over because they're what make dictation usable day to day:

• Your own words. Teach JustSpeak names, acronyms, and jargon once, and it remembers them. No more watching your co-founder's name get mangled every time.
• Modes. A quick Slack reply and a formal email want different tone, structure, and formatting. Pick a mode and JustSpeak shapes the text to match, right the first time.
• 100+ languages. Speak in the language you think in — and translate to English on the way out if you need to.

None of this matters if it's slow, so we made it fast. The gap between finishing a sentence and seeing it on screen is the whole product.

One purchase, yours to keep

JustSpeak is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Buy it once and it's yours. If it's not for you, there's a 30-day refund — no forms, no friction.

We're a small team, and that shapes everything: we'd rather earn your trust once and keep it than nickel-and-dime you every month.

Try it today

Open any app, press your shortcut, and start talking. That's the entire workflow — there's nothing to learn.

This is our first post, and it won't be our last. We'll use this space to share what we're building, how JustSpeak works under the hood, and tips to get more out of speaking instead of typing. Thanks for being here at the start.

— The JustSpeak team