Openbroca

Openbroca is an AI dictation app for Mac that turns spoken words into clear, ready-to-send text inside whatever app you are already typing in. You press a shortcut, talk the way you normally do, and Openbroca writes the result at your cursor — in email, messages, notes, documents, or AI prompts. It is built as a native Swift application for Mac with a download of roughly 6.5 MB, and it is positioned as a lightweight alternative to Typeless for Mac. Its stated purpose is simple: let you talk messy and read clean, so the way you speak naturally becomes the way your writing reads. It is aimed at Mac users who would rather speak a draft than type one, and who want the output to still sound like them rather than like a generic AI rewrite. Most people speak faster and more naturally than they type, yet dictation has historically been awkward in practice. Standard voice-to-text produces transcripts littered with fillers, false starts, and repetition, so the cleanup can take as long as typing the text by hand. Many writing assistants go the other way: they rewrite your words into a generic AI voice, and getting a usable result requires prompt tweaking and re-prompting. Openbroca is built around the gap between those two experiences. It assumes you will talk messily — the way people actually think out loud — and takes responsibility for turning that into clean, readable text that keeps your meaning and your tone, with no prompt tweaking required. The product sums this up as talk messy, read clean. AI cleanup is the core of the product. Instead of transcribing verbatim, Openbroca removes fillers and repetition from what you said while preserving your meaning and tone. That means you can speak a draft the way you would explain it to a colleague, complete with the ums, the half-restarts, and the repeated phrases, and still get text that is ready to send. Because no prompt tweaking is involved, there is no instruction to write, no model to coach, and no template to fill in — you simply dictate and the cleaned result appears. The stated benefit is text that still sounds like you, which matters for emails, messages, and AI prompts where your own phrasing carries intent and personality. A personal dictionary handles the vocabulary that generic dictation tends to get wrong. You add names, terms, and preferred spellings, and Openbroca can also learn from corrections you make right after dictation, so a mistake you fix once is less likely to recur. The dictionary supports spoken-phrase replacements — the site shows the example of mapping the spoken phrase open broker to Openbroca — which is useful for product names, client names, and jargon. Openbroca also supports importing a Typeless dictionary, so people switching from Typeless can carry their vocabulary across. An optional Screen Context feature helps recognize names and terms that appear on screen, and it is enabled during setup and can be switched on or off in Preferences. Translation extends dictation beyond a single language. You speak naturally, then choose one of 28 output languages, and Openbroca translates your dictation and puts the result at your cursor — so the source and the destination both stay inside the app you are working in. The language list spans English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, and more. On the input side, Openbroca supports dictation in 30 languages with automatic language detection, which means you do not have to declare a language before you start speaking. Together, automatic input detection and selectable output languages let you draft in one language and deliver in another without leaving your document. Operationally, Openbroca is built around a keyboard shortcut. Press Option-Space to start or stop dictation, or hold the shortcut while you talk. A second shortcut brings back your previous transcript when you want to reuse or recover it. Speech recognition and text cleanup are cloud-powered, so an internet connection is required, and Openbroca stores no audio. Setup involves granting microphone access and text insertion permission, with optional Screen Context if you want on-screen names and terms recognized. Preferences cover the microphone, shortcuts, and translation language. If direct insertion is unavailable, Openbroca copies the text so you can paste it manually, and you can retry a recording if the first attempt did not come out as expected. The whole setup is described as a few clean settings. The benefits follow from that design. You can speak a draft directly into the field you are working in and keep editing without switching apps, which keeps your flow intact. Cleanup happens automatically, so the time you would spend deleting fillers and repeated words is not spent at all. Because cleanup preserves meaning and tone, the result reads like your writing rather than like an AI paraphrase. The personal dictionary reduces repeated corrections of the same names and terms, and dictionary import lowers the cost of moving from another dictation tool. Translation into 28 languages removes the need to draft in one app and translate in another, since the translated text lands at your cursor. Concrete use cases named on the site include emails, messages, notes, docs, and AI prompts. In an email, you might speak a quick update to a colleague — the site's own example is a launch update about moving a final review to Thursday afternoon and sending an updated brief before lunch — and get a clean, sendable message. In messages, dictation lets you reply at speaking speed without typing on a keyboard. In notes and docs, you can capture a draft while it is fresh and edit afterward. For AI prompts, speaking a detailed prompt is often faster than typing one, and cleanup produces a clearer prompt while keeping your phrasing. With translation, you can dictate in your own language and deliver the output in one of 28 target languages. Openbroca is a universal Mac app for both Apple silicon and Intel, requiring macOS 15 or later, and it is distributed as a native Swift build of roughly 6.5 MB, which is the basis for its lightweight positioning. Dictation works in the apps you already use rather than in a separate editor, so there is no new workspace to learn. Pricing is free to try: the free plan includes 3,000 text units weekly with all features and no card required, and the site describes all features as free to try. A Windows version is not yet available; the site offers a waitlist for Windows availability and early-access updates. The takeaway is that Openbroca targets a narrow, practical problem — the distance between how you speak and how you need to write — and closes it inside the Mac apps you already use. Speak naturally, keep your tone, and get clean text at your cursor, with a personal dictionary that learns your vocabulary and translation into 28 languages when you need it.