What Quickword does

Press your shortcut in whatever you are working in and keep working in it. The text arrives in your email, your chat window, your document or the box in your browser. You never have to click into Quickword first, and nothing you had open moves.

Yes. Quickword turns your voice into text on your own computer, so nothing is sent anywhere while it does it. It keeps working on a plane, on hotel wifi, and when your connection drops in the middle of a sentence. There is no account, no sign-in screen, no cap on how much you can say, and nothing of yours on anyone's server.

Add the words that keep coming out wrong to the word list. Product names, people's names, acronyms and the terms your industry uses all come out in the form you wrote down, so the spelling you typed wins over whatever it sounded like. It takes a few minutes to fill in and then it stops being a problem.

Syncing is off when you install Quickword, and off means off. Turn it on and your recording is uploaded to Quickword's server, turned into text, tidied up so the words read properly, and saved to your account next to the text. The recording is deleted 14 days later by a job that runs every day.

An older laptop gets the same result as a fast one, and if a dictation goes wrong the recording is still there, so you can run it again rather than say it twice. It is one setting, per computer, and you can switch it back off.

Turn syncing on and sign in on each device with the same email. Every dictation you make then appears in one list that your Mac, your PC and the Android build all read, instead of three lists that never meet. A team can be made visible to its members with a setting, and the default is private to you.

Yes, and you do not have to say it a second time. The recording is kept for 14 days alongside the text, so pressing Retry runs the original again. Because the recording sits on the server rather than only on the machine that made it, you can press Retry from a different device than the one you dictated on.

A small pill appears on screen while you are recording, so you can see the microphone is live, and it disappears shortly after the text arrives. It floats above your other windows, cannot be typed into, and never steals your typing, so whatever you were working in stays exactly where it was. It remembers where you dragged it, per monitor, across restarts.

Yes, both which keys and how they behave. Hold a key while you talk, tap once to start and once to stop, or let a short press and a long press do different things. Out of the box you hold Ctrl and Shift to talk, or tap Ctrl, Shift and Z to start hands-free and tap again to stop. Both can be changed to whatever suits your hands.

Quickword can work out which language you are speaking on its own, or you can pick one and hold it there. It can also translate what you say into English as you go, so you can think in one language and write in another. The app itself is available in more than twenty languages, so the buttons and settings can be in yours.

Everything below is in the free app, with no account and nothing held back. None of it is a trial, and none of it is the part you have to pay to unlock. The list is short on purpose: Quickword does one job and tries to do it without getting in your way.