Hold one key and say the thing. It lands in whatever you were already working in — punctuated, tidied, and in the shape you meant it. No window to open. Nothing to paste. Nothing sent anywhere.
The tax
You can hold a whole paragraph in your head at once. You can only put it down one character at a time. Everything in that gap is tax.
Ship it — but the indx index rebuild has to land …first, or Tuesday’s report comes out empty.
still in your head, not on the page
Charged once per sentence. Every sentence. All day.
Ship it — but the index rebuild has to land first, or Tuesday’s report comes out empty.
arrived where the cursor already was
Corrections happen where corrections belong — after the whole thought is down.
The shift
Take the keyboard out of the middle. Hold a key, say the thing, let go.
Nothing to switch to. Nothing to paste. Nothing to tidy up afterwards.
Same key, nine rooms
There is no window to open and nothing to copy back out. You hold the key in the app you are already in, and the words land at the cursor you left there. The app you are standing in is part of the message: a terminal and an email are not the same problem, and Tessen does not treat them as one.
export async function retry(fn, tries) {
for (let i = 0; i < tries; i++) {
// back off on each attempt, then surface the last error
}
Selected useUploader — 34 lines
pull this into a hook, keep the loading state where it is, and leave the error toast alone
~/atlas % git status
On branch release/4.2 · 3 files changed
~/atlas % git rebase --interactive origin/main
[edge-01] listening · [edge-02] listening
~/atlas ❯ rsync -avz --dry-run ./build/ deploy@edge-01:/srv/www
func focusChanged(_ note: Notification) {
guard let window = view.window else { return }
// keep the caret where the user left it
}
To Priya Raman
Subject Revised figures for the Q3 note
Thanks for turning this round so quickly. The revised figures are attached, and the only open item left is the caption on the second chart — happy to take your wording on it.
Dana are we still cutting today?
heads up — cutting the release branch at four, ping me if anything is still in flight
are you close?
ten minutes out, order without me
Design review — Thursday
Three things worth keeping: the empty state does the explaining, the second screen can lose its header entirely, and nobody could find the export.
In a terminal
git rebase --interactive origin/main
Flags, paths and branch names. Nothing gets a capital letter for being at the start of a line, and nothing gets softened into a sentence.
In an email
Thanks for turning this round so quickly.
A comma where you paused, and a sentence that ends. The same words a terminal wants here would read as a mistake.
Cleanup
Speech is full of scaffolding — the um, the sentence you started and abandoned, the word you said twice while you thought. Tessen takes that out with rules that only ever drop a filler, close a repeat, or put in the comma you paused for. A rule cannot put a word in your mouth.
Um, so I think we should— actually, let’s, you know, let’s push the release to Thursday because the the localization files aren’t back from the vendor yet and like, I don’t want to ship half a language
Eight removals, three marks of punctuation, one capital letter — and not a single substituted word.
There is a second, optional pass that does more than tidy: it smooths phrasing, reorders an argument, makes you sound composed. We ran it on our own dictation for weeks, and it kept handing back sentences that read better and meant something slightly different.
So it arrives off — not buried, not defaulted on with a note in the changelog. Turn it on the day you want that help. Until then, the only thing between your voice and the page is a list of rules that can delete but cannot invent.
What made us switch it off
you said“Push the release to Thursday.”
came back“We may want to consider delaying the release.”
Same topic. Different commitment. You would have sent it.
Modes
The same unbroken stretch of talking can land as a note to yourself, an email to the person who has to approve it, a list for the standup, or one sentence that fits in a subject line. Pick the mode, and that is what appears at your cursor. The words stay yours — only the container changes.
I looked at the vendor quote this morning, and it comes in about twelve hundred over what we budgeted, mostly the rush shipping. I want to move the install to the week of the 14th and take standard freight instead, and I need Priya to sign off before Friday or we lose the slot.
Filler out, punctuation in. Not one word swapped for another.
SubjectVendor quote — install date and freight
Hi Priya,
I went through the vendor quote this morning. It comes in about $1,200 over what we budgeted, mostly the rush shipping.
I’d like to move the install to the week of the 14th and take standard freight instead. I need your sign-off before Friday, or we lose the slot.
Thanks,
Alex
A greeting, paragraph breaks and a sign-off. No facts you didn’t say.
Vendor quote — reviewed this morning
Split at the joins you already spoke — every “and” that was really a new point.
Vendor quote is ~$1,200 over budget on rush shipping. Moving the install to the week of the 14th on standard freight — need Priya’s sign-off by Friday or we lose the slot.
Two sentences instead of one long one. The date, the name and the deadline all survive.
Revisé el presupuesto del proveedor esta mañana y viene unos 1.200 $ por encima de lo previsto, sobre todo por el envío urgente. Quiero mover la instalación a la semana del 14 y usar el envío estándar. Necesito que Priya dé el visto bueno antes del viernes o perderemos la reserva.
I have reviewed the vendor’s quotation this morning. It exceeds our budgeted figure by approximately $1,200, the majority of which is attributable to expedited shipping. I would propose moving the installation to the week of the 14th and reverting to standard freight. Priya’s approval will be required before Friday in order to retain the slot.
quick one on the vendor quote — it’s ~$1,200 over budget, almost all of it rush shipping.
plan: install moves to the week of the 14th, standard freight instead.
@priya needs to sign off before Friday or we lose the slot.
Whatever you ask for, spoken in the same breath as the rest. It applies to what you just dictated.
Modes change the shape, never the substance. If a mode ever needs to invent a fact to fill its format, it leaves the gap instead.
Command mode
This one is for text that already exists — the paragraph you wrote last Thursday, the one you pasted in from somewhere else. Select it, hold the key, and say what you want done with it. The selection is replaced where it sits, on your machine. Modes shape what you are about to say. Command mode edits what has already been said.
We walked the Northgate team through the integration plan on Tuesday. Most of it is settled. The open item is the migration window.
I think it’s probably fair to say that we may want to consider pushing the migration window out by a week or so, largely because the data mapping work isn’t quite where we’d hoped it would be, and I suspect the vendor might not be able to get us the final field list until the end of next week at the earliest, which would leave the team with a fairly compressed period in which to test everything properly before we go live.
The migration window should move out by a week. The data mapping isn’t where we hoped, and the vendor’s final field list won’t reach us until the end of next week. That leaves too little time to test before go-live.
Migration window — proposal
We recommend deferring the migration window by one week. The data mapping is not yet complete, and the vendor has indicated that the final field list will not be available until the end of next week. The current schedule would leave insufficient time to complete testing prior to go-live.
We should push the migration window out by a week, because the data mapping work isn’t where we’d hoped it would be, and the vendor won’t have the final field list to us until the end of next week, which leaves the team a compressed period to test everything properly before we go live.
Everything else — credentials, the sandbox account, the runbook — is done and signed off.
Your paragraph, exactly as you left it. Every command below is one undo away from this line.
One long sentence became three short ones. The week, the field list and the go-live all survived the cut.
The reasons stop hiding behind one another. Four things, four lines, in the order you first put them.
Register up, claim unchanged. “We recommend” is still a recommendation — it did not promote itself to a decision.
Gone: I think · probably fair to say · may want to consider · or so · I suspect · might not be able to · at the earliest · fairly. Same paragraph, same length, no cushion.
Hold the key over the selection and say
The automatic polish ships switched off because a pass you did not start can quietly change what you meant. The same capability, summoned by name, is a different object. You chose the words it is allowed to touch, by selecting them. You said what to do, in your own voice, out loud. The result lands in front of you rather than behind you, and if it is wrong the paragraph you wrote is one undo away.
The line the product draws is in exactly one place: did you ask? On one side, a defect. On the other, the most useful thing in the app.
Which words it may touch
whatever you happened to dictate
the ones you selected, and nothing else
What it was told to do
improve it, generally
the sentence you just said
Getting your own sentence back
you have to notice first
one undo
Every trade has a hundred words that sound like ordinary English and are not. Keep a list of what it kept hearing and what you meant, or switch on the pack for your profession. The list is yours, and it is editable.
All four packs on.
Fix a word twice and it stops getting that word wrong. Every correction it has picked up is listed here in plain sight, and you can delete any of them.
Your dictionary is a file on your own Mac. Nobody else has a copy, and nothing is sent anywhere to make it work.
The four switches above are real. Turn one off.
That is the whole proof, and it takes about ten seconds. Every claim on this page about where your voice goes can be checked by you, on your own machine, without taking anyone's word for it — including mine.
The test
Nothing changes. Not the speed, not the words, not the punctuation. If dictation needed a server, this is where it would stop.
What never leaves
What does touch the internet
Both are separate from dictation, both are optional, and neither carries a word you said. A privacy claim that is 99% true is the kind worth distrusting, so here is the other 1%.
There is no account to make and no session to expire. A licence is a file you paste in — which is also why the app keeps working on a plane, in a basement, and on the day this website goes away.
The dictionary you just read is not a mockup and not a separate app. It is one tab of the Hub — a single page that opens from the menu bar and holds everything the app knows about your dictation: what you said, the words it learned, what is switched on, and what went wrong. It replaced four scattered things: a dashboard in a browser, a search box of its own, a settings file you had to open in a text editor, and a warning that flashed up once and was gone before you had read it. All of it is one file on your own Mac, and you can open it whenever you want to look.
What is switched on, in words. Not a score and not a report card — the choices you made, written out plainly enough that you can check them at a glance and change your mind.
Ready. Nothing needs you. And when something does need you, this is where it says so first — not a notification you might have been away from.
There is no leaderboard here and nothing is being scored. A tool that types for you should be able to tell you what it is currently doing without turning it into a performance.
Everything you have ever dictated, kept here. Searchable in full — by what you said, and by where it landed.
Ravi — the diligence pack is attached. The bridge facility prices wide of where we modelled it…
MailRewriting the export path so a retry is idempotent — running it twice should leave exactly one row…
SlackGroceries, and ring the dentist back before five. Also: tell Mum the flights are booked…
RemindersEvery dictation you have made, back to the first one, kept as plain text on this Mac. Re-read it, search it, copy a line back out of it, delete any of it. It is written here, searched here, and read here.
Your words, and the corrections it has picked up. The editor from further up this page, living in the third tab.
The packs you have on, the entries you typed yourself, and every word it started spelling your way because you fixed it twice — all listed, all editable, all deletable. Nothing it learned about you is kept anywhere you cannot see it.
The tab where bad news is allowed to appear. Software that runs quietly in the background has a problem: quiet and broken look exactly the same from the outside. So when something goes wrong, it is written down — here, in a sentence, and it stays until you have read it.
That third line is the reason this tab exists. It would have been easy to leave it out; a page that only ever says everything is fine is not evidence of anything. You are allowed to know when it fell over.
The last tab is this page. Everything you would otherwise have to go and look for, kept where the app is rather than somewhere you have to remember.
You should not have to go hunting through a website to find out what the thing on your own machine is doing.
The Hub is a file on this Mac. It opens in a window and closes like any other — there is no account behind it, nothing to sign into, and nothing about it is fetched from anywhere. Which is precisely why it can afford to show you all of it, including the parts that went wrong.
The five tabs above are real. Open Diagnostics.
One thing in common, and it is not their job: the sentence already exists, finished, in their head — and the keyboard is where it goes to slow down.
The developer
It describes what actually changed, because it was said while the change was still on the screen — not reconstructed later in a terminal that has forgotten it.
The clinician
The note is finished at the desk, in the record system already open, and nothing anyone said leaves the building. That is the condition of using it at all.
The one whose hands hurt
The working day stops ending at the wrists. The long email avoided for three days because of how much typing it is gets answered in the time it takes to say it.
The second-language speaker
The idea arrives on the page at the speed it was thought, not the speed it can be spelled — and nobody has to know writing was ever the hard part.
And if none of those are you — if you type quickly, comfortably, all day, and your hands have never once held you up, then this is a solution to a problem you do not have. Better to read that here than to find it out after paying.
Written by the person selling the first column, so it is built to be checked rather than believed. Where the other two win, it says they win.
| Tessen On your Mac | Built into macOS Already installed | A cloud dictation service Someone else's computer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where your voice goes | Nowhere It becomes text on the machine you are sitting at. The audio is not sent anywhere. | Depends Much of it stays on the device — but which parts is Apple's decision, and it changes between releases. | Off your machine Your voice is uploaded. That is not a flaw in the design; it is the design. |
| With the network off | Unchanged Dictation has no network path at all. Updates and licence activation do reach out; neither is near the key you hold to talk. | Mostly Offline for the languages it keeps on the device; the rest need a connection. Good on a plane, for most people. | Stops No connection, no dictation. On bad hotel wifi it is not slow, it is gone. |
| Your jargon and names | You teach it A personal dictionary — surnames, tickers, the acronym nobody outside your team knows — kept on your disk, and it learns your corrections. | Barely It picks up some names it can see on your Mac. There is no real way to hand it a vocabulary. | Often, yes Many accept a custom word list, and sheer exposure to the world's speech means they know terms nothing on your Mac has heard. |
| Rewriting what you meant | On your machine Say it once and have it come out as an email, as bullets, shorter, or in the register you asked for — on the Mac, like the dictation. | Not part of it Dictation writes down words. The system's writing tools are a separate feature, invoked afterwards on text you already have. | Usually its strength Tone, structure, translation, summarising — the good ones are very good at this. The cost is the row at the top. |
| Languages covered | No published list Not tested across enough languages to promise one. Try the language you actually work in before you rely on it. | Dozens A broad, documented list that arrives with the operating system and costs nothing. | Enormous The clear win for the cloud, and it is not close. If you switch languages daily, that reach is worth the upload. |
| What it costs | $9/mo · $69/yr · $149 once Pay monthly if you want to leave, yearly if you don't, or once and never again. Whichever you pick, it keeps working when you stop paying — you drop to the free tier, you are not locked out. | Nothing Free, and already on the Mac you bought. If it does what you need, use it. | Every month A subscription, indefinitely, and the words stop on the day the card is declined. |
Deliberately absent: any row on speed or accuracy. Nobody has measured either across enough real voices for a figure to mean anything; you settle both on your own voice.
It runs on your Mac, so nobody is metering you and no minute of speech costs anyone anything. That is why the free tier has no clock on it, and why buying it once is an option at all.
Free
$0
No card. No account. No expiry.
Not a trial. It does not stop.
Pro yearly
$69/year
Works out at $5.75 a month.
Every update, for as long as it runs.
Pro other ways
$9/month
Or $149 once, and never again.
Stop paying and you drop to Free. You are not locked out.
Answered the way they would be answered in an email, including the two places where the answer is worse than you were hoping.
There is no number on this page, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. It has not been measured across enough real voices — different accents, different rooms, different microphones — for a figure to mean anything, and a decimal point would only make a small private sample look like a finding.
So the only measurement that should decide this is yours: your voice, your words, the sentences you actually write all day. You will know inside ten minutes, and that verdict is worth more than a percentage lifted from someone else's test set.
No. You hold a key and talk the way you would talk to a person who is writing it down. There is no phrasebook, no trigger words to remember, nothing to say before you begin and nothing to say to stop.
If you want the same words as an email, as bullets, or shorter, you can ask for that in plain language — but that is an option you may never touch, not a syntax you have to learn first.
Yes — completely, and not as a degraded mode. Turn the wifi off and nothing about dictating changes, because none of it was ever using the network. That is the single test worth running before you trust any of this: switch the network off and see whether the words still appear.
Two things do reach the internet, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of almost-true privacy claim you should distrust: checking whether an update exists, and activating a licence. Both are separate from dictating, and neither runs when you hold the key.
A Mac with Apple silicon. Not an Intel Mac — that is a hard line, not a preference, and no amount of patience will get around it.
Two permissions, both granted in System Settings and both revocable there: access to the microphone, for the obvious reason, and permission to type into other applications, which is how the words end up in the window you were already working in rather than in a box you have to copy them out of.
One person, on one Mac, who uses it all day for everything — including most of the words on this page. It is not a company, there is no team, and nobody has invested in it.
That cuts both ways and you should price both sides. It is why the rough edges are where they are, and why the things that are finished are finished properly: they had to be, because the person who would have to live with them every day was the same person writing them.
The fair question to ask of one person, and the answer is structural rather than a promise. What you install is an application on your own disk that does its work without contacting anyone. There is no service to shut down, no account to deactivate, and no licence server whose disappearance turns the app into a dialogue box.
If development stopped tomorrow, the copy on your Mac would keep dictating exactly as it did the day before. That is the difference between buying software and renting access to somebody's servers.
No button, no waiting list, no countdown, no field asking for your email in exchange for something that does not exist. It is used every day by the person building it, which is not the same as being ready for you.
A page willing to tell you it has nothing to sell today has to keep telling you the truth on the day it does — and everything above was written under that rule: no invented numbers, no borrowed praise, no customers who do not exist.
There is one person behind this, and mail arrives with him rather than in a queue. The most useful thing you can send is the thing you tried to dictate and the place it came out wrong — a real sentence, in your own words, from your own trade. That is what the vocabulary is built from, and it is worth more than a compliment.
[email protected] It reaches one person directly, not a helpdesk queue.
Every placeholder above is deliberately unfinished-looking. When one turns into a real value it will be because a decision was made — not because a page needed something in the gap.