Push-to-talk · Windows & Mac
Hold. Speak.
Ship.
Velvet is the push-to-talk transcription engine for professionals who think faster than they type. Hold a hotkey anywhere on your computer, speak naturally, release — and your words appear as polished, cursor-ready text. No windows to switch. No buttons to click.
2,000 cloud + 2,000 local words / week · Free account · No credit card
Switching from Wispr Flow?
| Wispr Flow | Velvet | |
|---|---|---|
| Pro — annual | $12/mo | $8/mo |
| Free words / week | 2,000 | 4,000 |
Raw dictation · 12.4s
“So um basically I wanted to uh send you a quick message about the meeting tomorrow at um 3 pm and uh yeah let me know if that works”
AI-polished · 0.8s
I wanted to send you a quick note about tomorrow's 3 PM meeting. Let me know if that still works.
Hardware
Works with the keyboard you already own.
Trusted by writers, engineers, and researchers who speak their minds.
How it works
One hotkey. Three stages.
Every part of the pipeline is measured in milliseconds, so the only friction between thinking and sending is the speed of your voice.
- 01<100ms
Hold the hotkey — anywhere.
Press Right Alt (Right ⌥ on Mac), Caps Lock, or any key you remap. A quiet indicator confirms Velvet is listening. Your current window, scroll position, and cursor all stay exactly where they were.
- 02Local
Speak the way you think.
Ramble. Self-correct. Swap numbers mid-sentence. Use product names and acronyms. Velvet holds the audio in RAM only — nothing leaves your machine until you release.
- 030.8s avg.
Release — text appears.
Audio is transcribed with Whisper, polished by the editing layer, and typed into your cursor as if you had typed it. Full undo history. No clipboard hijacking. Works in every app.
Capabilities
Everything happens in the background.
Push-to-Talk, everywhere
Email, Slack, Word, your browser, your IDE, your terminal — if your cursor is in a text field, Velvet can type there. No browser extensions. No Electron wrappers. A native desktop app that respects your system.
AI-polished output (Pro)
Pro: removes fillers, fixes grammar, handles mid-speech corrections. “Meet at two, actually three” becomes “Meet at 3.” Mumbled lists become bullet points. Tone matches the app you're in. Free tier includes basic local cleanup.
Local-first, you control retention
Local Whisper keeps audio on-device. Transcripts are saved locally by default. Enable Privacy Mode to skip saving entirely — no history, no stats, no word count. Cloud mode is opt-in and deletes audio immediately after transcription.
Voice-triggered text expansion (Pro)
Say “scheduling link” — your Calendly URL appears. Say “email signature” — your full block is pasted. Unlimited snippets on Pro, regex-aware, supports multi-line and Markdown.
Personal dictionary (Pro)
Add names, jargon, and acronyms once — Velvet spells them correctly during AI cleanup. Import from CSV or JSON on your machine.
Per-app writing styles (Pro)
Casual in Slack. Formal in Gmail. Technical in VS Code. Compact in Linear. Velvet detects the active window and adapts tone, punctuation, and formatting automatically.
Organized history that follows you (Pro)
Every transcription is saved locally with folders, tags, search, and sort. Pro syncs your history across Windows and Mac — dictate on your desktop, find it on your laptop. Wispr Flow and Willow don't offer cross-device transcript sync.
The writing layer
Your voice, refined. Your meaning, preserved.
Velvet's editing layer is tuned for professional dictation. It cleans up messy speech without inventing ideas, sanding off edges, or losing the way you talk. The output sounds like you — at your best.
Smart editing
Filler removal, grammar, capitalization, numerals — all applied only when it helps.
Verifiable privacy
Open-source privacy auditor. Zero analytics. No cloud account required for local mode.
History that travels
Organize transcripts with folders and tags. Pro syncs your history across Windows and Mac.
Works wherever you work
If you can type into it, you can Velvet into it.
Velvet simulates real keystrokes at the OS level. No official integration needed — it works the moment you install it.
Built for trust
Your voice stays yours.
Dictation is intimate. Half-formed thoughts, client names, passwords read aloud by accident. Velvet treats every syllable as sensitive by default.
Runs entirely on your device
Whisper models transcribe on your CPU or GPU. No network calls, no background uploads. Transcripts are stored locally by default — enable Privacy Mode to skip saving entirely.
Opt-in, zero retention
When you choose speed over offline, audio streams to our endpoint and is deleted the instant the transcript returns. No training, ever.
Nothing is written anywhere
Enable once, and Velvet stops writing to disk — no transcripts and no local history.
Open-source auditor
A lightweight Rust auditor reads every syscall Velvet makes. Run it locally any time to verify what we promise.
The difference
Same category. 33% lower price.
Wispr Flow and Willow charge $15/month or $12/month billed annually. Velvet Pro is $10/month or $8/month billed annually — and the free tier adds 2,000 local words they don't offer.
| Wispr Flow | Willow | Velvet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud words / week | 2,000 | 2,000 | 2,000 |
| Local words / week | — | — | 2,000 |
| Total free words | 2,000 | 2,000 | 4,000 |
| Offline dictation (free) | No | No | Yes |
| Pro — monthly | $15 | $15 | $10 |
| Pro — annual | $12/mo ($144/yr) | $12/mo ($144/yr) | $8/mo ($96/yr) |
| Account required | Yes | Yes | Yes (free account) |
| Organized history (folders & tags) | No | No | Yes |
| Cross-device history sync | No | No | Pro |
| Verifiable privacy | No | No | Open-source auditor |
Wispr Flow and Willow include vocabulary on free; Velvet keeps dictionary and snippets on Pro. Neither competitor offers offline dictation at free or cross-device history sync — Velvet Pro does both. Prices from public pricing pages, June 2026.
Who it's for
Built for people who think faster than they type.
Email, faster than you can sigh.
Draft a 200-word reply in 20 seconds. Velvet handles the salutations, signatures, and scheduling links. You provide the voice.
Status updates that write themselves.
Speak your Monday brain-dump between meetings. Clean bullet points land in Slack, Linear, and Notion — formatted per app.
Commit messages and code review comments.
Dictate technical specs without breaking flow. Per-app styles preserve backticks, inline code, and punctuation expected by GitHub and GitLab.
Lectures, interviews, and notes.
Walk-and-talk into a first draft. Velvet's Personal Dictionary keeps citations, proper nouns, and Latin binomials correctly spelled.
Voices
A product quietly earning its keep.
Velvet is used daily by engineers, writers, clinicians, and researchers who asked us not to put their logos on the landing page. So here are their words instead.
“I write three times the documentation I used to. Velvet caught the naming of our internal services within a week.”
“My email backlog went from 200 to 40 in an afternoon. The grammar layer is the thing Wispr always promised but never delivered.”
“I run lectures with Velvet open in Obsidian. My notes are cleaner than anything I could type with gloves on in the field.”
Pricing
Start free. Upgrade if you want.
Never forced.
FOUNDERS at checkoutFree
Generous weekly quota for individuals. Free account required — no card unless you upgrade.
- 2,000 cloud + 2,000 local words per week
- Local transcription (Whisper)
- Basic local text cleanup
- Privacy mode
- Community support
Pro
For professionals who replace typing with speaking. $96 billed annually — vs $12/mo at Wispr Flow and Willow. Cancel any time.
- Unlimited words
- AI auto-edits & grammar
- Personal dictionary (unlimited)
- Snippet library
- Per-app writing styles
- Cross-device history sync
- Folders & tags for transcripts
- Whisper mode & priority cloud
- Priority email support
Does Velvet work offline?+
Yes. Local mode uses Whisper on your CPU or GPU and requires no internet after the model is downloaded. Cloud mode is opt-in and faster, but local is the default for Pro users.
Do you store my voice data?+
By default, transcripts are stored locally on your device so you can browse history, organize with folders and tags, and track usage. Pro subscribers sync history across Windows and Mac. Enable Privacy Mode to stop saving transcripts, stats, and history entirely. Cloud mode deletes audio the moment the transcript is returned — confirmable via our open-source privacy auditor. We never train on your data.
Is it just a dictation app?+
No — Velvet is a keystroke engine. Transcripts are typed into your focused window the same way you would type them, so undo, redo, cursor position, autocomplete, and shortcuts all keep working.
Stop typing. Start talking.
2,000 cloud and 2,000 local words every week. Create a free account to start — no credit card unless you upgrade to Pro.