Introducing Phrasora.
Dictation has been "almost there" for a decade. Speech recognition got fast and accurate, and yet most of us still type, because raw transcription gives you what you said — the ums, the false starts, the "no wait, Friday" — when what you wanted was what you meant.
Phrasora is a dictation tool built around that difference. You hold a key, talk like a person, and let go. What lands in your document is finished writing: punctuated, capitalized, cleaned of filler, with your spoken corrections already applied.
What's measurably different.
We think dictation tools should publish numbers, so here are ours, measured on the production pipeline and committed to our repository as engineering reports:
- 871 ms median from key release to text inserted in your app; 1,149 ms at the 90th percentile.
- 2.33% median word error rate on 73 real-speech recordings — before cleanup fixes things.
- A learning proof, not a learning promise. Cold start, 15 specialized terms, all 15 misheard. After natural corrections, all 15 correct — with zero false insertions on text where those terms never appeared.
- Zero over-corrections in 520 adversarial control cases for our spelled-name feature. Say "Sandu — S-A-N-D-H-U" and you get "Sandhu", once. Dictate "option A or B" and nothing collapses, because nothing was a spelling.
Learning you can see.
Every dictation tool with a personal dictionary has the same quiet failure mode: it learns something wrong, silently, and you only find out when your text comes out mangled.
Phrasora announces every term it learns, the moment it learns it — a small chip that says what was added, with eight seconds to undo. The undo is real: it removes the term everywhere, on every device, and blocks it from being immediately re-learned. The dictionary also tracks what each term gets confused with, so it stays accurate at hundreds of entries instead of degrading.
Nothing gets lost.
If you dictate into a password field, or focus moves while you speak, or a paste lands nowhere — your words are captured automatically to a scratchpad on the Mac app. We built a verifier that catches the worst case: the paste that reports success but never landed. You spoke; you get the text. That's the contract.
Where it runs.
Native apps for Mac, iPhone, and Android — Swift and Kotlin, one shared, tested core, no web wrappers. The Mac app is a menu bar item we use all day, every day. iPhone and Android run on real devices in the beta, with store releases on the way.
The beta.
Phrasora is in private beta and free while it's there. If you want in, join the waitlist — we email when your platform is ready, and that's all we use your address for.
We'll keep publishing what we measure.