to write,
by speaking.
An open source dictation app powered by Gemini. Listens in every language you actually speak.
Team, sent the agenda for tomorrow's meeting. Pls review when you get a chance.
Got it. Quick q — are we doing Q&A after the demo?
Message #general
I think in English. Also Hindi. Sometimes Punjabi. Most of the time all three at once — half a sentence in one, half in another. The way a billion of us actually talk.
Every dictation tool I tried flattened that. They all use Whisper, trained on the internet's English. It hears Hinglish and panics.
So I rebuilt dictation on Gemini — which listens to audio natively, instead of forcing it through speech-to-text first.
Gemini doesn't just transcribe what it heard. It understands what you meant. So you can give it instructions — fix my grammar, format as bullets, switch to Hindi. None of that is possible with a transcription model.
It started as a weekend project. My teammates wouldn't give it back. So I cleaned it up, added an API for friends who couldn't access Vertex, and made the whole thing open source.
Now it's yours.
— Lavish
lavish thakkar · maker, orate
01
capability 01
Whisper-based dictation flattens any language that isn't internet English. Gemini doesn't. hinglish, spanglish, taglish, franglais — code-switched mid-sentence whenever you want. Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese — orate handles them all, because Gemini does.
+ 90 more
fig. 01 — audio waveform · multilingual
02
capability 02
Because there's a real LLM listening, you can tell it what to do. Format as bullets. Fix my grammar. Translate to Hindi. Strip the ums. Add proper punctuation. Custom instructions that actually work.
you say:
“jot the action items as bullets, fix any spanglish in the first one, and translate the last point to japanese”
orate writes:
fig. 02 — code block · custom instruction
03
capability 03
Slack, Discord, Notion, Mail, Obsidian, your terminal. Any text field on macOS — orate types into it. No browser extension, no per-app integration. One menubar app, every text field on your Mac.
+ any text field on macOS
fig. 03 — 12 apps · 1 dictation surface
on privacy
Bring your own Google AI Studio or Vertex AI key, and orate talks straight to Gemini. You pay Google directly. Orate never sees a thing — not the audio, not the transcript, not the metadata. It can't.
Don't want to set up a key? Use Orate API— built originally for friends who couldn't access Vertex. Zero transcripts logged, ever.
on open source
The whole app is open source. Read it. Fork it. Build it yourself. Trust it because you can verify it — not because anyone asked you to.
The Orate API is going open source too. So if you'd rather not trust orate at all, you won't have to: spin up your own.
Subscriptions are extortion. Pay once, use what you bought, come back when you need more. That's the whole pricing philosophy.
option a · recommended
$0
forever — you pay Google directly
option b · for friends without vertex access
$10
/ 200,000 words
≈ two novels' worth, or a year of journaling
Coming soon.