Dictation in Claude
Voice dictation in Claude for detailed prompts, follow-ups, and document drafts
Claude rewards context, and typing a long, careful prompt is the slow part. SnailText lets you speak it instead, cleans it up with a local model, and drops the text in Claude or any other app.
Mac & Windows · Works in any field · Nothing uploaded
AI dictation in Claude, on your device
SnailText is AI dictation: a speech model turns your voice into text, then a second model cleans it up, dropping filler, fixing punctuation, and matching the style your work needs. Both models run on your own machine, so nothing you say in Claude is uploaded for transcription. Press the hotkey, speak, and the finished text lands at your cursor.
Does Claude have built-in dictation?
Claude has both a dictation feature (speech to text in the input field) and a separate voice mode (a spoken conversation). On the web it tends to default to English and mis-transcribe other languages, a common complaint among non-English speakers; it works better in the mobile app. It also streams your audio to Anthropic's servers and only works inside Claude. SnailText runs transcription on your own machine, lets you pick the dictation language explicitly (Whisper covers 99), and works in every other app too.
Speech to text in Claude: how it works
SnailText does not plug into Claude directly. It runs system-wide: a global hotkey (Option+Space (Mac) / Ctrl+Space (Windows), customizable) starts recording, the local speech-to-text engine (Whisper or Parakeet) transcribes what you said, and the text is pasted at your cursor through the system clipboard, the same way it lands when you type. That means it works in every Claude field, plus every other app on your Mac or Windows machine, with no extension or integration to set up.
That matters in Claude specifically: claude's answer quality scales with the context you give, and typing all that context by hand is slow. Speech to text removes that bottleneck without changing how you work in Claude.
Voice to text in Claude: what to dictate
Voice typing in Claude is not limited to one box. Press the hotkey anywhere a cursor blinks and your speech becomes text, so the things you would normally type out by hand become things you just say.
- · Long prompts with detailed context and constraints
- · Your own draft, dictated in, then handed to Claude to critique or rewrite
- · Follow-up turns refining a previous answer
- · Notes and outlines you want Claude to expand into a document
Where typing slows you down in Claude
- · Claude's answer quality scales with the context you give, and typing all that context by hand is slow.
- · Claude's own dictation only works inside Claude, so the moment you switch to your editor, email, or notes you are back to typing.
- · If you speak a language other than English, Claude's web dictation often defaults to English and garbles it, so you end up correcting the transcript or switching to typing.
Example dictations for Claude
Detailed prompt
"Review this product spec and tell me what is ambiguous, what is missing, and which requirements will be hardest to build, with a short reason for each."
Rewrite a draft
"Here is a rough draft of a launch announcement. Tighten it, keep my voice, and cut anything that reads like marketing filler."
Expand notes
"Turn these bullet points into a one-page brief with a summary, the proposed approach, and the open questions."
Claude voice dictation FAQ
Does Claude have voice dictation?
Can I dictate long prompts into Claude?
Can I use voice typing in Claude?
Does the dictation work offline?
Is my voice uploaded anywhere?
How much does SnailText cost?
Start dictating in Claude
Free local speech-to-text, no account needed. Works in Claude and every other app on Mac and Windows.