Talk to your AI coding tools instead of typing

Good prompts are long. Explaining a bug, a refactor, or a design decision out loud is faster than typing it, as long as the result reads like you wrote it.

Updated 2026-10-16

Why speak your prompts

Most people speak much faster than they type, often two to three times as fast. With AI coding assistants, the quality of the answer depends on how much context you give, and context is exactly what gets cut when you're typing. Tidytalk lets you hold a shortcut, explain the problem the way you would to a colleague, and paste a clean, punctuated paragraph into Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, your terminal, or a pull request.

What it looks like

You sayTidytalk pastes
Um, so the login test is flaky, it fails like one in ten times, I think it's because the, uh, the mock server isn't ready before the request, can you add a wait or, no, actually a retry with a timeout The login test is flaky and fails about one in ten times. I think the mock server isn't ready before the request. Can you add a retry with a timeout?
We should probably, um, cache the user list because it's loaded like three times on the dashboard We should probably cache the user list because it's loaded three times on the dashboard.

Your correction ("a wait or, no, actually a retry") keeps only the final version, and the fillers are gone. Nothing is summarized or added.

Keep technical terms intact

Switch the mode to Code (keep terms) in Settings › Set Up AI › Tidying. Terms, commands, file names, and symbols are kept exactly as you said them, and punctuation isn't converted. If you speak Chinese, English terms you mix in, such as "API" or "rate limit", are kept exactly as you said them.

Teach it your project's names

Speech recognition stumbles on names it has never heard: libraries, internal services, teammates. Two settings in Settings › Vocabulary fix this:

You can also add custom rules, such as "Write file names and commands in backticks", and Tidytalk follows them when it tidies.

Rewrite a draft with your voice

Select a rough note, hold Right Option, and say "turn this into a commit message" or "make this a bulleted list for the PR description". The selection is replaced with the result, and if the rewrite fails your text isn't touched.

Think in another language, write English

If English isn't your first language, set the output language to English and explain the problem in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Cantonese. Tidytalk tidies and translates in one step, which works well for English-only codebases and teams. See Dictate and translate.

Keep code context private

Your voice is always recognized on your Mac. If your prompts mention proprietary code, point Tidytalk at a local model in Ollama or LM Studio so the text never leaves your machine either. See Private and offline dictation.

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