Speechnotes is one of the most used free speech to text tools on the web: open the page in Chrome, click the mic, talk, copy the text. If you use it more than occasionally, you’ve felt the two limits.
The two limits
Copy and paste. Everything you dictate lands in Speechnotes, not where you need it. Every Slack message, every email, every note is a dictate, select, copy, switch, paste. That’s four steps that a keyboard doesn’t have.
Browser speech recognition. Speechnotes uses the speech engine built into Chrome. It’s a literal transcript, so ums go in and punctuation is spoken or missing, and names and technical terms are guesses.
The alternative
A dictation app that lives in the menu bar and types into whatever you’re using. Hold a key, talk, let go, and the text is already in the Slack message box, the email, the doc. No page, no copy.
Speaky Box does that on a Mac, and adds the cleanup Speechnotes doesn’t have: ums and false starts removed, punctuation added, grammar fixed, names spelt from a list you control. In Claude or ChatGPT it goes further and turns what you said into a structured prompt. Free for 2,000 words a week, no card, no browser needed.
If you want to stay in the browser
Google Docs voice typing does the same job as Speechnotes inside a document, Chrome only. How it works and its limits. Or use Mac dictation, which is free and types into any field, transcript-style.
Speechnotes is fine for a one-off. For daily use, stop copying.