Shaberu

Talk instead of typing. On the Mac it is a tap of a modifier key; on iPhone it is a keyboard. Either way the tidied-up text lands where you were already working.

Download for macOS

macOS 14+ ・ Apple Silicon

Or with Homebrew:

brew install --cask walkccc/tap/shaberu

The iPhone keyboard is coming to the App Store.

Built for the way people here actually talk

Half of what gets said in a Taiwanese office is Chinese with English nouns dropped into it — 這個 component 要 refactor — and every dictation app treats that as a mistake to be corrected in one direction or the other. Shaberu treats it as the sentence. Speech recognition, the conversion into Taiwanese Traditional (by wording, not character by character), the spacing between scripts and the final polish all run on Shaberu's server, which is also why the vocabulary keeps improving without you updating anything. The recording is transcribed and thrown away in the same request; it is never written to disk on our side.

Inside

• Chinese and English are detected as you speak — there is nothing to switch.
• Chinese comes out as Taiwanese Traditional or Simplified, and Traditional is converted by wording rather than character by character: 软件 becomes 軟體, not 軟件.
• Polishing removes filler, adds punctuation and recovers English words the recogniser mangled. It can be turned off, and the Taiwanese wording and spacing still run — those are rules, not a model.
• Names and jargon you add to your vocabulary are given to the recogniser before it listens, on both devices.
• One account across the Mac and the iPhone. Sign in with Apple, and that is the whole of the sign-up.
• Mac. Tap right Shift to start, tap again to send, Esc to throw it away — the key can be either Shift, Option, Command, Control or Fn. Text arrives by paste, with the clipboard borrowed and put back exactly, or keystroke by keystroke where an app refuses one.
• Mac. Say "new line", "new paragraph" or "make that a list" mid-sentence and it is obeyed rather than typed.
• iPhone. Switch to the Shaberu keyboard with 🌐, tap the microphone, talk, tap again. There is no QWERTY on it and there is not meant to be — the keyboard you switched away from is better at the four keys it would have carried.
• iPhone. The microphone is open only while you are speaking, so the recording indicator is lit for those seconds and not for the whole time Shaberu is waiting in the background.