Murmurtale What Murmurtale does
Murmurtale is a dictation app for fiction writers. It lives in your menu bar. You click into any text field, hold a key, and speak; when you let go, Murmurtale transcribes what you said, cleans it up like a careful copy editor, and drops the finished text at your cursor.
It is built for prose, not command-and-control. That means dialogue gets its quotation marks, a new speaker gets a new paragraph, thoughts you tag (“she thought”) or mark out loud with “in italics” are set in italics, and your character and place names are spelled the way you spell them.
One promiseMurmurtale only cleans up what you said. It never writes for you and never invents sentences. Your words stay yours.
What you need
- A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) running macOS 14 or later.
- About 1 GB of free space for the on-device speech model, which downloads on first launch.
- Two macOS permissions, Microphone and Accessibility. Nothing else.
You do not need an account for your first 5,000 on-device words, which run entirely on your Mac; after that, a free account keeps you dictating at 5,000 on-device words a month, at no cost. New accounts also get a free 14-day Pro trial of the cloud engine, no credit card. See Usage and limits.
Your first ten minutes
- Install Murmurtale and open it from your Applications folder.
- Grant the two permissions in the welcome window. It walks you through each one.
- Dictate your first line into TextEdit to feel how it works.
- When you are ready, set up a Book Profile so the formatting matches your novel.
That is the whole on-ramp. Everything else in this help center is here when you want to go deeper.