soink is back for 1.0 🎉: Live streaming at your cursor, fully hands-free. A macOS dictation alternative, best for hands that hurt.
We posted the soink beta here in March. Huge thanks to everyone who tried it and sent feedback. We spent the last three months rebuilding the app around it, and 1.0 is out today! 🎉 The problem I type for a living, and last year a wrist injury (TFCC) pushed me onto voice input. I tried every AI dictation tool I could find. They're good, but they all work the same way: you talk, you wait, then a block of text gets pasted in. For quick messages that's fine. For the long writing I do all day, it kept breaking my flow, and I couldn't see the words as I said them, so I'd lose my train of thought halfway through a sentence. So we built soink (soink.ai) to work like a voice keyboard, ⚡live and 🙌 hands-free . What it does Streaming at your cursor. Words appear in your text field as you talk, cleaned up in real time. No popup, no paste. Voice editing. Say "change tomorrow morning to tonight" and it fixes that spot. Voice send. Say "send" and it sends, then you keep talking. Voice and keyboard together. Type a quick fix, move the cursor, keep talking. No mode to toggle. Fully hands-free. Tap your shortcut once to start. It keeps going on its own, and you never tap again to stop. Write, edit, and send by voice. How it compares The first frame of our demo video puts all three side by side. Other AI dictation (Wispr Flow, Aqua Voice, Spokenly, Superwhisper, Typeless): all transcribe first, then paste. Some show live text in a floating pill stuck on your screen. soink is the only one that streams into the text field you're actually typing in. Apple's built-in dictation types live at your cursor, but has no AI, so it can't clean up punctuation or messy speech, or do the AI things soink does, like hands-free editing and sending. More AI features are coming, like voice-driven desktop agents. Pricing 30 minutes free to try. Pro is $10 right now new launch price (normally $12/month). Real-time streaming ASR and LLM aren't cheap, but we want to keep it low and give as much usage as we can. If typing is painful from a wrist condition or a disability, email us and we'll set you up at $8/month. Full pricing: soink.ai/plans What changed since the beta Your feedback drove all of it: Runs alongside any keyboard, no more switching input sources (the biggest ask) Set your own shortcut Setup with no reboot More languages Faster and steadier One honest thing soink isn't a local model. We use the cloud so the real-time streaming feels good and works for more people, but we don't record or log what you say, and nothing is used to train anything. The mic is only on while you dictate. Privacy policy and terms are on the site. Trust & Transparency soink is built by AtaraFlow, LLC. My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shimiao/. Changelog: check here Download: soink.ai/download Questions or feedback? Join our Discord Thanks for reading. Come try soink, and give your hands a break 💚.
Collected discussion
Rare to see virtually live transcription, but hard to justify a subscription just for that.
Fair enough, and thanks for giving it a read. I actually started building this for myself last year after a wrist injury. I tried the clipboard-paste route first, but it kept dropping content, so I went with the keyboard input path instead. It took way longer, mostly interaction details and stability, but that's what lets voice and keyboard mix in the same field, fully hands-free. The live part is the point for me: I can watch the words land, fix something, or send by voice, without losing my train of thought.
Yes, that is nice. Superwhisper can also display words live, but does not insert them until a dictation segment is complete, so you have an edge there.
interesting! I use voiceInc right now because its brutally fast, but the option to send the message with your voice is nice! I might wonder if there is more distinct correction ability like „delete the whole last sentence“ or so its kind of squishy on my end at this stage
Yeah, deleting or editing individual words works fine right now. Deleting a whole sentence can work too if you give it a clear instruction, so feel free to try it. We’re also planning a dedicated version for voice-editing commands later, which should make that whole experience much more stable. And on the speed side, you might want to try soink’s streaming mode. It’s really, really fast with super low latency.
Cool, I've had wrist pain in the paste. Will try soon.
Thanks, hope the wrist treats you better. You're exactly who this was built for, so if anything feels rough, tell me here or on Discord and I'll get on it.
Nice to see it back at 1.0. Live-at-the-cursor dictation is a genuinely different use case from what I work on (long recorded audio), so not competing... the hands-free angle for people whose hands hurt is a good reason to exist. Curious if the live stream stays fully on-device or hits a server.
thanks, we use cloud service to process dictation
What does this have fluidvoice don’t?
soink is streaming at cursor, since the realtime feature, you can edit, send message by voice, fully hands free
I am curious as to why you didn't went with any local model for this? You could have a free tier in this too via that.
Yeah, totally fair question. We did look at local models, and I still think they’re interesting, especially for privacy and potentially a free/offline tier. For the first version though, we wanted the experience to be really fast, accurate, and consistent across different machines.
Congrats on the launch. Streaming directly at the cursor is actually a much better UX than the "dictate → wait → paste" workflow. Curious,how difficult was it to make this work consistently across native macOS apps, Electron apps, and browsers? Outlook and Slack can be notoriously hard.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it. soink currently works reliably across all apps, including Outlook, Slack or any Electron apps and native macOS apps. They are fully supported and stable. It did take quite a lot of time to handle all the compatibility work and testing.
this is brilliant, love how this was created to solve your real world problem and now can help others also. is the ai processing on device?
thanks it's running on claude
Wow! This approach is good. That’s how macOS built-in dictation works, but it lacks quality. Dictation tools like wispr, novavoice, aquavoice etc - transcribe perfectly, but you mentioned their problem - pasted only u finished speaking. How did you achieve both - past as you speak and good quality of transcription?
Both the ASR and the LLM process everything in real time. Give it a try and see how it feels!
Amazing! Great app
Sounds good..when you have BYOK then the cost can be one-time...let me know.
It seems like a very nice tool. It would be perfect if it run locally in my opinion. Are you using very "heavy" llms to do the smart stuff? Or are they the low tier ones?
If local-only is the main requirement, that's the first thing I'd verify before getting attached to any of these. The heavier model question mostly matters for latency and cost, but in dictation the bigger practical issue is whether it feels instant enough to keep your train of thought, which is why I like apps that type straight into the field instead of doing a paste-after-the-fact step, like DictaFlow as an example
Interesting... I wonder if there is some gap to close in this category of apps. Like, I see many of them spawning here, but I'd like to understand if there's something none of them does and that would really be useful and wanted from users. Maybe being local-only is one thing, but also some new interesting features...