Jarq

Jarq is a macOS app that translates, shortens, fixes, or rewrites any text right where your cursor is, inside any app on your Mac. Instead of moving text out to a browser tab or a separate window, Jarq acts in place: you select text, hit a hotkey, and the result replaces the selection or is copied for pasting. The same app also handles dictation — you press a hotkey, speak, and clean text with punctuation lands at the cursor. It is built for people who write, reply and work across apps all day and who want their editing and translation to happen without leaving the field they are already typing in. Jarq supports thirteen languages and runs from the menu bar, answering a key wherever you are already typing. The problem Jarq describes is the cost of leaving your context. Every trip to a translator tab drops your train of thought. The site lays out the old way as seven steps and two app switches: select the text and copy it, switch to a translator tab, paste and wait for the answer, copy the result, switch back to where you were, paste it, and then wonder where you were. With Jarq the same job takes two steps and zero switches: select the text and click the button. That difference matters because, as the site puts it, the train of thought is gone and the flow is broken. By keeping the work in the app you are already in, Jarq removes the copying, the switching and the waiting from the loop, which is where the friction — and the lost momentum — actually lives. Translate any selection is the core surface of the app. Select text anywhere on your Mac and the buttons appear right there beside it — the dot. One click replaces the text in place, or copies it to paste. Because the buttons appear next to the selection, you never open a window: you select, point at the dot, and you are done. A side effect the team says they did not plan is that translations appear next to the original, in real context, and the site argues that this is exactly how words stick: phrases you translate today stop needing a translator at all. Translation between any two of the thirteen supported languages is handled from the same inline buttons, and the app offers a particular quality of translation — not word-for-word, but the way you would actually say it, with your tone kept intact. Dictation lets you speak and get typed text. Press the dictation hotkey, talk, and press it again: clean text with punctuation lands at the cursor, in any app — Slack, Mail, your IDE. Dictation works together with translation: you can speak in one language and get clean text in another, so saying it in Russian can put English into the input. Jarq supports thirteen languages, including English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German, and you can either speak one and type another, or translate a selection between any two. Apple's dictation, the site notes, does not do this: Jarq drops finished text — punctuation, capitals, the language you chose — into any app, and can translate as you speak, and it keeps working in the apps macOS dictation trips over. Actions let you create your own buttons. You write an instruction in your own words — shorten this, fix the grammar, make it formal — and it becomes a button that sits beside the language buttons; one tap runs it on the selected text. Selected text is never read as a command, only as material, which keeps custom instructions safe to reuse. Jarq also claims to work where other tools cannot: in Figma or a terminal, the ⌥T hotkey grabs the text anyway, even in places where an app blocks the inline selection. Control is part of the design — every hotkey can be remapped, and history stays on your Mac as a file on your own disk. Jarq's approach is to stay where you already are. The app sits in the menu bar, one file dragged into Applications, and answers a key wherever you are typing. There are two keys between you and finished text: a hotkey that acts on a selection, and a dictation hotkey that turns speech into finished text at the cursor. Where a selection is blocked, ⌥T reaches the text anyway. On privacy, the site is direct: an app that hears you and types for you owes a straight answer about both. History is a file on your own disk, and with on-device recognition your voice never leaves the Mac. In the cloud, a recording or a selection becomes text in memory and comes straight back — stored nowhere, used to train nothing. The microphone opens with the hotkey and closes when you stop. Jarq does use cloud AI models to process your text and voice, but says Jarq itself does not keep your text on its servers. The benefits follow from that. You keep your flow: no tabs, no copy-paste, no app switching, and no re-reading to find where you were. Editing happens in place, so a sentence can be shortened, cleaned up or made more formal without leaving the draft you are working in. Translation arrives next to the original text in real context, which — as the site describes — is how words stick and can reduce how often you need a translator at all. Dictation produces finished text with punctuation and capitals rather than a raw transcript, and it works in the apps macOS dictation struggles with. Because history stays on your Mac and voice can stay on-device, users get these conveniences without sending their writing out to a separate service window. The site names several concrete situations. If you work in two languages, you read in one and answer in the other: you tap a message to read it in your language, then tap your reply so it goes out in theirs, as shown with Telegram. If email eats your day, you write the draft fast and then tap a sentence to make it shorter, cleaner or more formal, fixing long drafts, typos and off tone. If you would rather talk than type, you press the dictation hotkey, speak, and clean text lands in the field — the site shows this in Slack, with speak English producing finished English, as well as Mail and an IDE. And if you want your own buttons, you write an instruction in your own words and it becomes a one-tap action. Translation, shortening, grammar fixes and rewrites all happen on selected text in any app — a browser, a PDF, Figma, a terminal or a native window. Jarq is for Mac users who write and reply across many apps — people working in two languages, people buried in email drafts, people who prefer to talk rather than type, and people who want their own custom editing buttons. It requires a Mac on Apple Silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 13 Ventura or newer. There is no integration to set up: the app works in any app where you can select text, from a browser and a PDF to Figma, a terminal, and native windows. Pricing starts with fourteen days of Pro, free, with no card and no account. After that, the free plan keeps working with 5 dictations or translations a day, unlimited on-device dictation, no account and no expiry. Pro is $4.99 a month or $39 a year and includes unlimited dictation and translation and up to two Macs, cancellable any time. A Lifetime option, at launch price $179 once instead of $200, includes everything in Pro and every future version, for up to two Macs. Prices are in USD with tax included, payable by card, PayPal or Apple Pay, with 30 days to change your mind. The download is version 1.0, 15.1 MB. Jarq's value proposition is simple: two keys between you and finished text. By translating, shortening, fixing, rewriting and dictating in place — in any app, without tabs or copy-paste — it keeps your editing and your flow together, while keeping your history on your Mac and your voice, with on-device recognition, from leaving it.