Free online voice typing

How to use this voice typing tool

1. Open this page in Chrome, Edge, or another Chromium browser. Firefox has no speech recognition at all, and Safari’s version usually gives up after a few seconds.
2. Pick your language from the dropdown. Set it before you start, not after.
3. Press Start dictating and approve the microphone prompt. The browser only asks once per site, and only on an HTTPS page.
4. Speak in whole sentences at a normal pace. Grey italic text under the box is the engine’s running guess; it firms up into the main box a second or two later.
5. Press Stop dictating, fix anything that came out wrong by typing directly in the box, then hit Copy text and paste it where it belongs.

Which browsers actually support voice typing?

Browser dictation is built on the Web Speech API, and support for it is uneven in a way that catches people out. Here is the honest state of it:

• Google Chrome (desktop and Android) — full support. This is the reference implementation and the one everything else is measured against.
• Microsoft Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera, Vivaldi — supported, because they are all Chromium underneath.
• Safari — partial. The API exists behind the webkitSpeechRecognition prefix, but sessions end quickly, continuous mode is unreliable, and results often stop arriving with no error.
• Firefox — not implemented. The tool will tell you so rather than silently doing nothing.

Two other conditions are easy to miss. The page must be served over HTTPS — browsers refuse microphone access on a plain http:// origin, with localhost as the only exception. And the tab has to stay in the foreground: switch away and most browsers suspend recognition within a few seconds.

Where your audio actually goes

This is the part most free dictation pages leave out. This page does not have a server component and never posts your transcript anywhere — but the recognition itself is done by the browser, and Chrome performs it in the cloud. Your microphone audio is streamed to Google’s speech service, converted to text there, and sent back to the tab. That is why browser dictation stops working the moment your connection drops.

For a shopping list or a blog paragraph, fine. For a client’s medical history, a legal note, an unreleased product spec or anything under an NDA, decide deliberately rather than by default. Any browser-based recogniser has this property, no matter how the page is worded.

Getting punctuation into browser dictation

The Web Speech API gives a page raw recognised words. Chrome inserts some punctuation on its own in English, and will often honour spoken markers like “period”, “comma” and “question mark”, but the behaviour differs by language and changes between browser versions. Treat it as a bonus, not a contract: say the marker, and if it comes out as the literal word, fix it in the box before you copy. Paragraph breaks are not offered at all — press Enter yourself where you want one.

Practical tips for a usable first draft

• Keep the microphone about a hand’s width from your mouth and slightly off to one side, so plosives (“p”, “b”) do not thump the capsule.
• Speak in complete sentences. Recognition uses surrounding words as context, so half-sentences and long pauses in the middle of a clause produce worse text.
• Do not stop to correct a single word. Keep going and clean up at the end — you will finish faster and the engine will make fewer mistakes.
• Names, product names, jargon and acronyms are where every general-purpose engine struggles. Expect to fix them by hand here; a desktop tool with a custom vocabulary is the real fix.
• A wired headset or any dedicated microphone beats a laptop’s built-in array, especially in a room with hard surfaces.

What a browser tool cannot do

This page is a demo of speech-to-text, not a way of working. The text only appears in this one text box, in this one tab. Every dictation ends with the same four steps: select, copy, switch app, paste. That is fine once. It is not fine forty times a day, and it is why browser dictation never becomes a habit for most people.

Everything else it lacks follows from the same limitation. There is no custom vocabulary for the names you say constantly. There are no filler words stripped out, so every “um” and “you know” is transcribed faithfully. There is no record of what you dictated last week. And the tab has to stay focused, so you cannot dictate into the thing you are actually looking at.

How VoiceSnap Pro handles the same job

VoiceSnap Pro is a dictation app for macOS and Windows built around removing that copy-paste step. You hold one keyboard shortcut anywhere on your machine, speak, and clean punctuated text appears in whatever field your cursor is already in — a Gmail reply, a Slack message, a Jira ticket, a commit message, a browser form. Filler words are stripped automatically, paragraph breaks are inserted where you paused, and you can teach it the names and acronyms you use. It handles 50+ languages, including switching language mid-sentence, and every dictation is also saved to a searchable notes library so last Tuesday’s recording is still findable. Nothing you dictate is used to train AI models, and it is a one-time $39 purchase rather than another monthly line item.

VoiceSnap Pro has not shipped yet. Join the waitlist and you’ll get one email on release day. In the meantime this page is genuinely useful, and so are the other free tools.

Questions people ask about this tool

Is voice typing here free, and do I need an account?

It is free, and there is no account, no signup and no usage limit. The tool is a single page of JavaScript that talks to the speech engine already inside your browser.

Why did it stop listening on its own?

Browsers end a recognition session after a stretch of silence. This page restarts it automatically, which is why long dictations keep working, but a very long silence or a backgrounded tab can still end it. Press Start again and carry on — the text you already have is untouched.

The microphone prompt never appeared.

Either permission was denied earlier, or the page is not on HTTPS. Click the padlock or microphone icon in the address bar, set the microphone to Allow, and reload. On macOS also check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and confirm your browser is listed and enabled.

Can I use it on a phone?

Chrome on Android works. iOS is a different story: every iOS browser is Safari underneath, so support is the partial, unreliable kind described above. On an iPhone the built-in keyboard dictation key is a better bet.

Does it work offline?

No. Recognition happens on a server, so a dropped connection stops the transcript. Desktop dictation apps that run the model locally are the answer if offline matters to you.

How accurate should I expect it to be?

On clear speech, a decent microphone and a quiet room, browser recognition is good enough that editing is faster than typing from scratch. Accuracy falls off sharply with background noise, several people talking, strong accents in a language variant you did not select, and any word the engine has never seen — which is most product names.