About Quickword

Quickword is built by Charles Lau. It started because he was paying $15 a month for a dictation app that only worked with a live internet connection, kept a separate history on every device, and uploaded every recording he ever made. He dictates most of his work, so all three of those things bothered him daily rather than occasionally.

There was no plan to sell anything. He needed a dictation tool that worked on his own machines, on his MacBook and his PC, and kept one history he could reach from either. Nothing on the market did all three, so he built it, used it for two weeks straight, cancelled the subscription, and then put a website in front of it.

Each half of this exists somewhere already. Some dictation apps do everything on your own computer and never join your devices up. Others sync across your devices and send everything they hear to their own servers, and the best known of them stops you at 2,000 words a week for free. Quickword is both halves: free and private by default, with syncing you can turn on when you want it.

Formula Won Labs is the agency Charles runs. It gets local service businesses found on Google Maps and in the answers ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give, which is close work with business profiles, schema and the pages an engine actually reads.

Quickword came out of that work rather than out of a product plan. The agency dictates most of what it writes, and paying per seat for a tool that uploaded every recording was the wrong trade. It is given away because a tool you use every day is a better introduction than a pitch, and nothing on this site asks you to hire anyone.

Quickword is a fork of Handy, a free speech-to-text app by CJ Pais released under the MIT licence. The local transcription path, the recording overlay, the model handling and much of the desktop machinery come from that project and are unchanged. Quickword adds the syncing layer, the shared history, the retry path, the Android bubble and its own branding.

The current release is a real, usable one and it is also an early one. Being specific about that is more useful than a disclaimer.

Bug reports, feature requests and "this went wrong on my machine" messages all go to the same place, and they are read by the person who wrote the code.