Where long dictation usually breaks
Short dictations are easy. Long ones expose three problems that most tools quietly have:
- The wait at the end. Many tools record everything, then upload and process the whole file after you stop. Five minutes of talking can mean a long stare at a spinner.
- All or nothing. If anything goes wrong during that one big upload, the whole dictation is gone.
- The world moves. Over five minutes, your headphones connect, a notification steals focus, or you switch windows. Each of those can end a recording or drop the result into the wrong place.
How Reeve handles it
Slices while you talk
Reeve sends your audio to the provider in slices of about 20 seconds while you are still speaking. By the time you let go of the key, most of the dictation is already transcribed. Only the last slice is left, so the full text arrives a few seconds after you stop, whether you talked for thirty seconds or five minutes.
A microphone change does not end the recording
Put your AirPods in halfway through a sentence and Reeve keeps recording on the new microphone. Your music keeps sounding like music.
Nothing gets lost
Every result is typed where your cursor is and also placed on the clipboard. If another window grabbed focus while you were talking, paste with ⌘V and it is all there.
What people use it for
Brain dumps
Open an empty note, hold the key and say everything that is on your mind about a project: what is blocked, what you are worried about, what you would do with a free afternoon. Then mark the whole thing, hold the key again and say “turn this into a to-do list grouped by project”. Reeve rewrites the marked text in place.
Notes right after a meeting
Walk out of the meeting, open your notes and talk through what was decided, who owns what and what is still open, while you still remember it. Two minutes of talking replaces the notes you were going to write “later”. Reeve records your voice only while you hold the key, so you get your own summary and the meeting itself is never recorded.
Voice memos that become documents
Talk through the first draft of a proposal, a blog post or a hard email. The first draft is the slowest part of writing, and talking gets you past the blank page. Edit afterwards, by hand or by marking a section and saying what to change.
Long prompts
AI assistants give better answers to detailed prompts. Describing the full context out loud takes a minute; typing it takes ten. The developers guide has more on dictating prompts for coding assistants.
What a long dictation costs
Usage is billed by your AI provider at about $0.0014 per 15 seconds, so roughly half a cent per minute. A five-minute brain dump costs about three cents. Doing one every working day adds around 60 cents a month to your provider bill. The app itself is $19 once. See dictation without a subscription for the full maths.
Tips for talking at length
- Start with the point. Say what the note is about in the first sentence. It makes the rewrite step work better.
- Pause freely. Silence costs almost nothing and the cleanup removes the gaps.
- Correct yourself out loud. Say “no, Wednesday” and the cleaned text keeps Wednesday.
- Structure afterwards. Talk first, then mark it and ask for headings, bullets or a shorter version.
- Mix languages if that is how you think. Danish and English in the same dump is fine.