For developers · updated July 2026

Dictation that respects code.

You don't type slowly because of code. You type slowly because of everything around it — commits, PRs, comments, docs, Slack. Say those instead.

The honest scope

Acousmos is not a voice-coding grammar — if you want to drive vim by voice, Talon is the right tool. Acousmos is for the prose that eats your day: the commit message you keep flattening to "fix stuff", the PR description you postpone, the design reasoning that dies in your head because writing it down is friction. Press a hotkey, talk like you'd explain it to a colleague, and get clean text where your cursor is.

Built for the workflow

Three things most dictation tools get wrong here.

1 · Polish that knows when to stop

Most of what you dictate at work today isn't shell commands — it's prompts to Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. The dedicated Coding style is built for exactly that: identifiers and technical terms kept exact, rambling tightened into clear instructions. Assign styles per app once (Coding for the AI tools, Verbatim where you want every word literal, Formal for Mail) and the primary hotkey switches automatically from then on — you never toggle anything mid-flow.

2 · A dictionary that speaks your codebase

Generic speech models butcher identifiers. Acousmos has a three-layer dictionary — vocabulary biasing at the recognition step, context-aware corrections, and literal replacements — and it learns from your hand-edits: fix "cube control" to "kubectl" once, and it proposes the correction for review. Names, service names, jargon: taught once, right every time.

3 · Your rubber-duck sessions, searchable

The best design thinking happens out loud — and evaporates. Every Acousmos dictation is archived locally: audio plus text, full-text searchable. "Why did we pick the queue over pub/sub?" is answerable six months later, because you said it out loud the day you decided, and the archive kept it. Open format, exportable, yours whether or not you subscribe.

Privacy for NDA work

Everything is stored locally, never collected, and never trained on. Pro adds two exits from anyone's cloud: bring your own API keys, or fully local models that work offline. Dictating about proprietary systems in airplane mode is a supported workflow, not a loophole.

Where developers point it

The words around the work.

Commit messages

Explain the change like you would in review — get a real message, not "wip".

PR descriptions

Context, tradeoffs, test notes — spoken in two minutes instead of postponed for two hours.

Docs & comments

The Coding style turns rambling into docstring-appropriate prose.

Standups & Slack

Mild polish keeps your voice casual but readable.

Issues & postmortems

Narrate the timeline while it's fresh; edit structure later.

Design thinking

Think out loud; search it later. The archive is the second brain.

Try it on your next commit

One month of Pro, free.

No signup, no card. Or test the engines with your own voice in Arena — say a few identifiers and judge for yourself.