How to dictate AI prompts on a Mac

Plain dictation types what you said, cleaned up: filler words and false starts are gone, corrections are applied, and the punctuation is right. It edits what you said. It doesn't answer it or translate it.

Prompt mode is a second hold-to-talk mode. You ramble in. A clear prompt comes out. A long ramble with one real request becomes one sentence, reworded, reordered and shortened, ready to paste into an AI.

Let go of Shift first if you want to go back to plain dictation before you finish. If you'd rather not hold Shift the whole time, you can make each Shift press switch Prompt mode on or off.

JuTalk runs in the background once it's set up. You don't change apps to dictate.

This is the example on the JuTalk homepage.

After Option and Shift, that ramble is rewritten as a short prompt for an AI — one request, reordered and shortened, that you can send in any chat box. Use it when you know what you want, but you don't want to sit down and type the instructions.

Prompt mode isn't only for speech. Select text you already wrote and hold ⌃ Control and ⇧ Shift. The pill says "Writing prompt…", and while you keep holding Control, JuTalk replaces the selection with a prompt. The microphone isn't used.

Let go of Control before it finishes and nothing changes. The Shift setting on this page applies here too: hold Shift, or press Shift to toggle. Holding Control without Shift polishes the selection instead of turning it into a prompt. The polish guide has the rest: the 20,000-character limit, undo, and where it works.

• In an AI chat. Open ChatGPT, Claude, or any other assistant, hold Option and Shift, and describe the task out loud. The prompt lands in that chat box, not in a special JuTalk window.
• In a coding assistant. The same hold works in any text field, including editors and agent chats, as long as you can type there.
• When the request is messy. If you need a polite email, a short summary, or a structured question, talk it through, then let Prompt mode turn it into instructions for the model.

Use plain dictation, without Shift, when you want your own words on the page: a message you'll send as you, a note, or a paragraph that should still sound like you. Cleanup will still tidy ums and false starts. Switch to Prompt mode when the text is for a model, not for a person.

• A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer) running macOS 14 Sonoma or later.
• JuTalk installed, with microphone and Accessibility permission. The download page explains both.
• An account. The free trial is 7 days or 1 hour of audio, whichever runs out first, with no card. It starts when you first sign in on your Mac. Prompt mode is included in the trial, Starter, and Pro.

Starter is $3 a month or $30 a year for 3 hours. Pro is $9 a month or $90 a year for 10 hours. Dictation counts as the length of the audio. Prompt mode does not use extra time on top of that. Polish what you typed is free for the first 100 times each day. After that, each one that succeeds uses 5 seconds of your hours, plus 1 second per 150 characters. A polish that fails doesn't use hours.

JuTalk only records while you hold the key. When you let go, your audio goes through JuTalk's servers to a speech recognition provider. Prompt mode, like cleanup (on by default), then sends the text to an AI provider. JuTalk's servers don't store your audio or your text; they only count the minutes.

If you'd rather not use that AI step, turn cleanup off and don't use Prompt mode. You'll get a transcript of what you said instead of a rewritten prompt. Details are in the privacy policy.

JuTalk needs a connection. If it drops, the recording stays on your Mac and JuTalk retries for up to 7 days. The finished text goes to your clipboard.

Every step and limit in this guide comes from jutalk.app, the homepage FAQ, and the privacy policy, checked on November 13, 2026. The landlord-email ramble is the example published on the homepage. I don't add model names, keyboard shortcuts, or product behaviors that the live site doesn't state.