Dictate in any app · Writing
Google Docs has built-in voice typing, but it works only inside Docs and only in Chrome, Edge and Safari. With Typally you hold a hotkey, speak, and the text lands in Google Docs exactly where your cursor was.
Disclosure: Typally is our product. We have tried to describe what Google Docs already does without talking you out of using it.Tools → Voice typing, which has shipped for years and is genuinely decent at raw words. Two limits people hit fast: Google lists the latest Chrome, Edge and Safari for it, so Firefox users get nothing, and it works only inside Docs and Slides, not in the other apps you write in.
Docs is where long text gets written, so it is where dictation pays off most and where the built-in tool's habit of quietly stopping costs most. You look at a reference tab, talk for ninety seconds, come back and find nothing was captured.
In practice people use it for: First drafts, meeting write-ups, client proposals, long email replies that outgrew the inbox, and the sort of blog post that is easier to say out loud than to type.
You do not configure anything in Google Docs. The hotkey works wherever your cursor happens to be:
Windows or macOS build, signed in once.
Text goes wherever Google Docs has focus. One click first saves undoing a paragraph in the wrong box.
Say the whole thought, then let go. No time limit.
Voice typing in Docs inserts at the cursor, so click into the document before you start — if focus is in the comment box, that is where the paragraph lands.
Typally types into Docs from outside the browser, so Google's browser list does not apply: it works in Firefox too, where Docs voice typing is not offered. It reaches the comment box as well as the document body, and the same key works in every other app.
A consultant writing a project proposal keeps the brief open in a second window. With the built-in tool she has to keep clicking back into the Docs tab to restart voice typing every time she checks a requirement. Dictating at the system level, she reads a line from the brief, talks for a minute, glances back, and carries on — the proposal gets written in one sitting instead of three.
Dictate the messy version straight through without correcting yourself, then edit with the keyboard. Docs' revision history means the rough pass is never lost, so there is no reason to be careful on the first take.
Voice typing in Docs inserts at the cursor, so click into the document before you start — if focus is in the comment box, that is where the paragraph lands.
In Safari, yes: Google lists the latest Chrome, Edge and Safari. Not in Firefox. A system-level dictation app types into whatever window has focus, so the browser makes no difference.
The built-in tool listens only while the Docs tab is focused, by design. Anything that runs at the operating-system level keeps listening while you look at another window.
The built-in voice typing writes into the document body. A system-level dictation tool types wherever the cursor is, including the comment box and suggestion mode.
You can try this on the free plan — 100 minutes a month, no card, no trial countdown.
Also dictate in: Microsoft Word · Notion · WordPress · Apple Pages · iA Writer · see all apps