Jarq

Jarq is a Mac app that acts on text right where your cursor already is, inside whatever application you happen to be using. Instead of copying text into a separate translator tab or assistant window, you select a passage, point at the dot that appears beside it, and choose an action: translate, shorten, fix, or rewrite. The result lands where you wrote it, replacing the selection in place. Jarq also dictates: you press a hotkey, speak, and finished text with punctuation and capitals appears at the cursor. It is built for people who write, read and answer messages all day on a Mac — in email, chat, documents or code — and who lose momentum every time they have to leave the app they are working in. Jarq exists because of a specific, repeated annoyance: every trip to a translator tab drops your train of thought. The website lays out the old way in seven steps — select the text and copy it, switch to a translator tab, paste and wait for the answer, copy the result, switch back, paste again, and then ask yourself where you were. That is seven steps and two app switches. Jarq reduces the same job to two steps and zero app switches: select the text, click a language button. There is a second, unplanned benefit the team highlights: because translations appear next to the original text in its real context, rather than in an isolated tab, words tend to stick, and phrases you translate today eventually stop needing a translator at all. The core interaction is minimal. Select text anywhere on your Mac and a small set of buttons appears right beside the selection — the product calls this the dot. From there you can translate, shorten or fix any text in the app you are in, and the answer lands where you wrote it. Where an application blocks text selection, Jarq has a fallback: the ⌥T hotkey grabs the text anyway, which the site says makes it work in places others cannot, naming Figma and terminals. Actions can be applied as a replacement in place, or copied for pasting elsewhere. Jarq runs from the menu bar and answers its keys wherever you are already typing. Translation is available for any selection across thirteen languages, including English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German. You can translate between any two of them, or speak one language and get clean text in another — say it in Russian and English lands in the input. The site draws an explicit contrast between word-for-word translation and the way you would actually say it: Jarq aims for natural wording while keeping your tone intact rather than producing a literal rendering. Language buttons such as EN and RU sit beside the selection, and the site lists English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Kazakh, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese among its language options. Dictation follows the same in-place philosophy. You press ⌥ ` (Option plus backtick), talk, and press it again; polished text — punctuation and capitals included — appears right at the cursor of any app, whether that is Slack, Mail or your IDE. Dictation can also translate as you speak, so a spoken sentence in one language can land as written text in another. The site positions this against Apple's built-in dictation by noting that Jarq drops finished text into any app, can translate while you speak, and keeps working in the apps macOS dictation trips over. The microphone opens with the hotkey and closes when you stop, and the recording is not kept once it has become text. Beyond the built-in actions, Jarq lets you build your own buttons. You write an instruction in your own words — shorten this, fix the grammar, make it formal — and it becomes a button beside the language buttons, one tap away, listed alongside EN, RU, Shorten and a plus control for adding more. A notable design detail: selected text is never read as a command, only as material, so an instruction you have written is treated as the instruction and your selection is treated as the thing to be acted on. This keeps behaviour predictable when you are rewriting someone else's words, or text that itself looks like an instruction. Jarq is designed to stay out of the way and stay under your control. Every hotkey can be remapped, and your history stays on your Mac. The app installs as one file dragged into Applications, sits in the menu bar, and answers a key wherever you are already typing. The download page lists version 1.0 (84) at 15.1 MB, and the product is described as needing macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon. Privacy is addressed directly on the site because, as the page puts it, an app that hears you and types for you owes you a straight answer about both. Two paths are described. On your Mac, 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, trained on never. Jarq itself does not keep your text on its servers, and the microphone only opens with the hotkey and closes when you stop. A full privacy policy is linked from the site. Dictation through the optional on-device model is free and unlimited on every plan precisely because it never reaches Jarq's servers, so there is nothing to charge for. The outcome Jarq promises is continuity. Your flow stays intact: instead of a long chain of small context switches a day, there is one selection and one click. Writing speeds up too — you write the draft fast, then tap a sentence to make it shorter, cleaner or more formal, so a rushed first pass can leave the app already polished. Because translations appear in context, the site argues that words stick and repeated phrases gradually stop needing translation. And because actions are applied where the text already lives, there is no round trip through a browser tab or a separate assistant window: the same edits happen in place, in whatever app you are already working in. Four scenarios anchor the product on its website. The first is bilingual work: reading a message in one language and replying in another — the example is a Telegram conversation where a Russian message is read in your language and a reply goes out in theirs. The second is email: long drafts, typos and the wrong tone, handled by tapping a sentence in a Mail draft to shorten, clean or formalise it. The third is talking instead of typing — pressing the hotkey and speaking into Slack, Mail or an IDE and having clean text land in the field. The fourth is custom buttons: writing an instruction once and running it with a tap on whatever sentence is in front of you. A fifth case is any app that resists selection, where ⌥T reaches the text anyway, from Figma to a terminal to a PDF. Jarq is aimed at Mac users who work across languages and live in text: people who read in one language and answer in another, people whose email eats their day, and people who would rather talk than type. It is a native macOS app — the download requires macOS 13 Ventura or later on Apple Silicon (M1 or later). Pricing has three tiers. Free keeps working after the trial 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 for unlimited dictation and translation on up to 2 Macs, cancellable any time. A lifetime option at a $179 launch price (from $200) includes everything in Pro plus every future version, up to 2 Macs. Every install begins with 14 days of Pro at no cost, without a card or an account, prices are in USD with tax included, payment can be by card, PayPal or Apple Pay, and there are 30 days to change your mind. Jarq's value proposition fits in a sentence: translate, shorten, fix or rewrite any text right where your cursor is, in any app on your Mac — and dictate there too, without tabs and without copy-paste. Select, hit a hotkey, and the answer replaces the selection in place. Fourteen days of Pro are free, the free plan keeps working afterwards, and dictation can stay entirely on your machine.