Your voice, at scale.
Not a machine that writes for you. A machine that stops you losing the things you already said well, and refuses to flatten them when you ask for help.
It fits if you think faster than you type, lose good phrasing between the idea and the document, and want editing help that does not turn your sentences into everyone else's. Stilou dictates into any Mac app, keeps every capture findable by meaning, and rewrites against a Voiceprint learned from your own writing. It does not write for you and is macOS only.
The best sentence you wrote this month, you said out loud.
It happened in the shower, or on a walk, or halfway through explaining the idea to somebody who asked a good question. Fully formed, better than anything you have typed in a fortnight — and gone within the hour, because the only capture tool available was your memory.
What survives instead is the version you typed later: more careful, more hedged, worse. And the research is in a similar state — forty tabs, a highlighted PDF, three voice memos you never transcribed, and a folder of screenshots named after the second you pressed the key.
Then the editing tools arrive and make it worse in a new way. They are excellent at grammar and quietly disastrous at voice: every suggestion pulls the sentence toward a house style that belongs to nobody. You accept three, and by the fourth paragraph the piece sounds like a press release.
What changes
Capture at the speed of thinking; help that does not sand you down.
Speech becomes finished text.
Hold a key, talk, and paragraphed text lands in whatever you are writing in — fillers gone, punctuation inferred rather than dictated aloud. In Private mode it runs on your Mac, so it works on a train with no signal.
The idea gets caught where it happens.
One keystroke banks a thought without opening an app or deciding where it goes. No folder, no tag, no filing decision at the exact moment you least want to make one.
Research you can ask, not scroll.
Screenshots are read and indexed by what is inside them; notes and dictations are indexed by meaning. “That thing about attention spans I read in March” is a workable search here.
Edits that keep the person who wrote it.
Rewrites work against a Voiceprint learned from your own writing rather than a house style. Grammarly is better at catching errors; this is about what the sentence sounds like afterwards.
From a walk to a draft, without losing the good version
- The walkNinety seconds dictated into a note — the argument, in the words that arrived first. Kept as a dot, not just as text.
- The readingThree screenshots from a paper and a long thread. Read, indexed, filed to the same piece without you naming anything.
- The draftAsk what you have on the topic. The walk, the screenshots and a note from six weeks ago come back together, with sources.
- The editSelect a clumsy paragraph, invoke the Bar, say what you want. It comes back fixed and still recognisably yours.
Worth knowing. If you want a machine to generate the piece, use a frontier model — it will do that better than we will. This is for the part where the thinking was already yours.
The tools that matter most here
All 13 ship in one app. These are the ones that earn their keep fastest for this kind of week.
Where Stilou won't help you
- It does not write for youNo generate-a-draft-from-a-prompt, and no plans for one. If that is what you want, ChatGPT or Claude is the tool and we would rather say so than sell you something else.
- Grammarly catches more errorsFor pure grammar and mechanics, and for Windows, the web and Google Docs, Grammarly is the stronger tool. Our advantage is voice, not correctness.
- It is not a writing appNo manuscript management, no versions, no outliner, no export to InDesign. It works inside whatever you already write in and stays out of the way.
- macOS only, plain text onlyNo iPad app for longhand or reading, and notes are deliberately plain text — no drawings, tables or attachments. Apple Notes is better at that and we say so.
Frequently asked questions
Will it make my writing sound like AI?
That is the specific failure the Voiceprint exists to avoid. Rewrites are shaped by patterns learned from your own writing rather than by a house style, and the tone dial takes plain-word instructions instead of preset registers. It is still a model, so read what it gives you — but the design goal is that the sentence keeps the person who wrote it.
Does dictation work offline?
Yes, in Private mode, where transcription runs on your Mac and the audio never leaves it. That matters on trains and planes, and it matters for anything under embargo. Wispr Flow, by contrast, states in its own documentation that transcription always happens in the cloud — see the comparison.
Is my unpublished work used to train anything?
No. In Private mode nothing is transmitted at all. In Connected mode the passage a request needs goes to a hosted provider that is contractually barred from training on it, and no recordings are retained. /privacy has the surface-by-surface detail.
Can I get my notes out?
The brain is a set of files on your own disk rather than rows in someone's database, and notes are plain text. There is no proprietary vault holding your work hostage.