Guide
Dictating in Slack
Most of a working day in Slack is short prose. It is the least interesting typing you do, and the easiest to hand over.
The short answer
Voz types into whatever has focus, so the Slack message box behaves like any other text field: hold the key, talk, release, read it, send.
There is no Slack app to install and no workspace admin to ask. Voz never connects to Slack at all — macOS delivers the text as though you typed it.
Setting it up
- Install Voz and grant microphone and accessibility permission when macOS asks.
- Click into a Slack message box, a thread reply, or the search field.
- Hold your push-to-talk key, speak, release.
- Check it, then send. Voz does not press Enter for you, on purpose.
Where it earns its keep
Thread replies and DMs, mostly. The messages long enough to be annoying to type but too short to justify opening a document — a paragraph of context for a colleague, a status update, an explanation of what broke.
It also works in the search box, which is a small thing that turns out to matter: describing what you are looking for out loud is faster than constructing the query.
Why not macOS dictation?
You can use Apple's built-in dictation in Slack, and if it works for you there is no reason to change. Where people run into it: it stops after a while, it is weaker on names and jargon, and on-device mode has to be arranged per language. Voz has no time limit, lets you add your colleagues' names and your product's vocabulary, and always runs on device.
Worth knowing
- Add teammates' names and internal project names to custom vocabulary. Slack is full of proper nouns no general model has seen.
- Say "new line" to break a paragraph; Slack treats it as a soft return rather than sending.
- Speech reads more casually than typing. That usually fits Slack better than it fits email.
- Nothing you dictate is uploaded, which is worth knowing given how much of Slack is work you are not supposed to repeat.