Openbroca

Openbroca is an AI voice dictation app for Mac, built as a native Mac application for both Apple silicon and Intel Macs. Its purpose is stated plainly on its website: talk messy, read clean. You press a shortcut, speak the way you normally do, and Openbroca turns your words into clear, ready-to-send text inside the Mac app you are already using. The product describes itself as the best Typeless alternative for Mac, and it is aimed at people who write in emails, messages, notes, docs and AI prompts and would rather speak a first draft than type it. Everything happens in the field where your cursor already sits, so you can keep editing without switching apps. A personal dictionary, optional Screen Context and translation are included to help you write across apps and languages. The problem Openbroca addresses is the gap between how people speak and how they need to write. The website opens with a demonstration of that difference: a sentence spoken with "uh", "like" and "you know" scattered through it, and the same sentence reading back clean. Most dictation delivers a literal transcript of that mess, which means the speaker still has to go back and edit out the filler, the false starts and the repetition before the text is usable. Openbroca's stated approach is to remove fillers and repetition while keeping your meaning and tone — and to do it without prompt tweaking. That matters because dictation is only a shortcut if the output is ready to send; if every transcript needs a cleanup pass, the time saved by speaking disappears into editing. AI cleanup is the core of the product. After you speak, Openbroca cleans up what you said: it removes fillers and repetition while preserving your meaning and your tone, and it does so without asking you to write or tune a prompt. The website frames the result as clean, ready-to-send text that still sounds like you. The example shown on the site is a short update to a colleague — "Hi Maya, quick update on the launch..." — the kind of message someone would normally dictate loosely and then fix by hand. Because the cleanup keeps tone rather than flattening the text into something generic, the output can be inserted directly into a message or email without a rewrite. The Product Hunt description also notes that all features, including this cleanup, are free to try. Two features work on the accuracy of specific words. The first is a personal dictionary: you add names, terms and preferred spellings, and Openbroca can also learn from corrections you make right after dictation. The preferences screenshot shows the mechanism — spoken-phrase replacements such as "open broker" mapped to "Openbroca" — alongside a "Learn words automatically" option, and the Product Hunt description mentions Typeless dictionary import so existing entries can be brought over. The second is optional Screen Context, which the setup instructions describe as helping Openbroca recognize names and terms on screen. Both features target the same weakness of generic speech recognition: it does not know your colleagues' names, your product names, or the spellings your team uses. Rather than correcting the same words every time, you teach the dictionary once and let the app apply it. Openbroca also supports multilingual dictation and translation. The website states that dictation works in 30 languages with automatic language detection, and that you can choose from 28 output languages for translation. You speak naturally, choose one of the 28 output languages, and Openbroca translates your dictation and puts the result at your cursor. The site lists a subset of the supported output languages — English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Hindi and Thai — and the site itself is localized into Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. The translation language is set in Preferences, alongside the microphone and shortcuts. For anyone who writes to people in more than one language, this removes the separate step of dictating in one app and translating in another. How it works overall is deliberately small. Openbroca is a native Swift app with a download of roughly 6.5 MB, and setup involves three things: allowing microphone access, allowing text insertion, and optionally enabling Screen Context. You press ⌥ Space to start or stop dictation, or hold the shortcut while you talk; another shortcut brings back your previous transcript. Speech recognition and text cleanup are cloud-powered, which is why an internet connection is required, and the site states that Openbroca stores no audio. If direct insertion is unavailable, Openbroca copies the text so you can paste it, and you can retry a recording. Recall exists so a good transcript is not lost once it has been inserted. The stated benefits follow from those mechanics. Dictation becomes usable for finished writing rather than only for rough drafts, because cleanup happens before the text reaches the field. The output keeps the speaker's tone, so the result reads like the person wrote it. Work stays inside the apps people already use — the site names emails, messages, notes, docs and AI prompts — so there is no new editor to learn and no copy-paste between tools. The dictionary reduces repeated correction of the same names and terms, and the import path from Typeless lowers the cost of switching. Translation into 28 languages means the same speaking habit works for audiences in other languages. And because the app is small, native, and free to try with all features on the free plan, trying it costs little. Concrete uses shown or described on the site include writing email and messages — the on-site demo is a launch update to a colleague, inserted into Notes — and drafting docs and AI prompts by voice rather than typing. The product page names emails, messages, notes, docs and AI prompts as the places people use it, and the screenshots show the Mac apps involved: Notes, Safari, Messages, Mail, Maps, Calendar, Music and Finder. Translation is a use case of its own: speak in one language, pick one of 28 output languages, and the translated text lands at the cursor. Recall and the clipboard fallback cover the practical cases — reusing an earlier transcript, or pasting the text yourself when an app will not accept direct insertion. Screen Context is for dictation where the correct names are visible on screen. Openbroca is aimed at Mac users who write a lot and would rather speak a first draft. The requirements are explicit: a universal Apple silicon and Intel build running macOS 15 or later. The free plan provides 3,000 text units weekly with all features and no card required, and the site describes all features as free to try. Processing is cloud-powered, so an internet connection is needed, and the privacy page is linked from the processing note alongside the statement that no audio is stored. A Windows version is not available; the site collects a waitlist for release and early-access updates, restricted to Windows availability and early-access updates. On Product Hunt the product is listed under Productivity, Artificial Intelligence and Menu Bar Apps. The takeaway is the sentence on the homepage: talk messy, read clean. Openbroca's value proposition is not more features in a dictation tool but a shorter path from speech to finished text — press ⌥ Space, speak naturally, and get clean text that keeps your meaning and tone in whatever Mac app you are already typing in, supported by a personal dictionary that learns your vocabulary and translation into 28 languages.