Free for our coaching group, and for everyone else

Talk.
It types.

Hold a key, say what you mean, and the words show up wherever your cursor is. Email, Slack, ChatGPT, anything.

Free, no subscription
No account
Works offline
Runs on 8GB laptops

How it works

Three steps. The first one is the whole trick.

Option Space Ctrl + Space on Windows

Hold your shortcut

Click into any text box, anywhere on your computer, and hold the keys down. Or tap once to keep it listening. You can change the keys.

Step 2

Talk like normal

No robot voice. Say "um," change your mind, keep going.

Step 3

Let go

A second later, the words are typed out for you.

Privacy

Your voice never leaves the room.

Most dictation apps send your audio to their servers to turn it into text. Say Less does that work on your own laptop, so there's nothing to send.

Typical cloud dictation

Your mic→Their servers→Text

Needs internet. Needs an account. Your recordings sit on someone else's computer.

Say Less

Your mic→Your laptop→Text

Works on a plane. No sign-up. Nothing to leak, because nothing leaves.

What's inside

Small app. Does the job.

Voice snippets

Save text you type all the time and trigger it with a short phrase.

Say "my calendar link" and your full booking link gets typed.

Cleaner writing

Filler words get cut, and your own vocabulary (names, brands, slang) gets spelled right.

"um so basically we should uh ship it" becomes "We should ship it."

Works in every app

If you can type there, you can talk there.

Light on your laptop

Picks a speech model sized for your machine, down to 8GB of RAM.

Bring your old words

Coming from another dictation app? Import your saved word list.

The difference

Same job. None of the bill.

	Say Less	Typical paid dictation
Price	Free	Monthly subscription
Works without internet	Yes	Usually no
Account required	No	Yes
Audio leaves your computer	Never	Yes
Open source	Yes	No

FAQ

Questions people ask.

Is it actually free?

Yes. No trial, no credit card, no account. It runs on your computer, so there's no server bill to pass on to you.

Will it run on my laptop?

If it has 8GB of RAM or more, yes. Say Less uses small, fast speech models built to run on normal laptops, not gaming rigs.

Does it need internet?

Only once, to download the speech model the first time you open it. After that it works fully offline.

Why does my Mac ask for permissions?

Two of them. Microphone, so it can hear you. Accessibility, so it can type into other apps for you. It can't do its job without both.

Mac or Windows?

Both. Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, plus Windows 10 and 11.

Can it clean up my writing with AI?

Optional. If you have your own AI key, you can turn on extra cleanup. That step sends the text (never the audio) to the AI provider you choose. It's off unless you turn it on.

Where did it come from?

Say Less is built on Handy, an open-source dictation project. We added our own features and design on top, and the code is open under the MIT license.

Stop typing everything.

Download Say Less, hold a key, and talk.

Download for Mac Download for Windows