Dictation for VS Code and Terminal
A lot of a developer’s day is prose: commit messages, review comments, tickets, and long prompts to a coding agent. Pines Voice lets you say them. Hold the right Option key, speak, let go, and the words land at the cursor in VS Code, Terminal or whatever else is in front.
Where it helps
- Commit messages
- Say what changed and why, at the prompt or in the commit box. A full sentence costs no more than a short one.
- Prompts to an agent
- Explain the task out loud to a coding agent in its chat panel or terminal. Long, specific prompts get much easier when you talk them.
- Review comments
- Talk through what a change does and what to fix, straight into the review box in the browser.
- Docs and tickets
- READMEs, issue descriptions and replies in Slack, all in the same gesture.
How it fits a developer’s Mac
- No integration
- It types at the caret, so the editor, the terminal and the browser all behave the same way.
- One key
- Hold the right Option key to talk. Tap it once to keep listening for a longer take, press Esc to throw it away.
- Your words
- Teach the dictionary your library names and jargon once, and they come out right from then on.
- Offline
- Parakeet or whisper.cpp on the Mac. Nothing you say about unreleased work leaves the machine.
- The formatter
- The optional formatter tidies English prose. Leave it off when you dictate code.
If you want dictation that reads your open files and turns “user ID” into userId, Wispr Flow does that in Cursor, Windsurf and VS Code, in the cloud. The Wispr Flow comparison has the details.
Questions people ask
Does Pines Voice work in VS Code?
Yes. Pines Voice types at the caret through the macOS Accessibility API, so it works in the VS Code editor, its integrated terminal, and any other app with a text cursor. There is no extension to install.
Does it work in Terminal?
Yes. Terminal is one of the apps it types into like any other. Say a commit message at the prompt and it is typed there.
Can it spell my project’s names correctly?
Yes. The dictionary holds your own replacements, so a library, a product or a colleague’s name comes out the way you spell it, every time.
Does my code or speech leave my Mac?
With the local engine, no. Speech is turned into text on your Mac. With a cloud engine it goes straight to the provider whose key you added, and never through Pines Rocks.
How much does it cost?
Nothing. Pines Voice is free, the whole app. You sign in with Google or email to use it.