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Read Aloud and voice input

Have replies read out loud in the voice you pick, and speak instead of typing in the message box.

Written By Daniel Nguyen

BoltAI can read replies out loud, and type what you say into the message box. Both are set up in Settings › Voice.

Hear a reply read aloud

Click Read Aloud under a reply.

Pick a voice for Read Aloud

Open Settings › Voice. Under Read Aloud, set Engine:

  • Apple (Built-in): your Mac's default voice. Nothing to set up.
  • OpenAI: choose a TTS Model and a Default Voice.
  • xAI (Grok): choose a Voice and a Language.
  • MiniMax: choose a TTS Model and a Voice.

For xAI and MiniMax, click the play button next to Voice to hear a sample.

OpenAI, xAI and MiniMax use your API key for that provider. If you haven't added one, click Add Service…. See OpenAI, xAI and MiniMax.

Keep the audio of a reply

Turn on Save Read Aloud audio as message attachment. The audio is saved to the message as an attachment.

This works with the OpenAI, xAI and MiniMax engines.

Dictate a message

Click the microphone in the message box and speak. Your words appear in the message box. See The message box.

The first time, BoltAI asks for microphone access and which engine to use.

Start and stop dictation with a shortcut

Open Settings › Shortcuts and set Start/Stop Voice Input. It has no shortcut until you set one.

Choose the speech engine

Open Settings › Voice. Under Speech to Text, set Engine:

  • Apple (Built-in): Apple's built-in speech recognition. Nothing to set up.
  • Local (On-device): models that run on this Mac and work offline.
  • OpenAI: choose a Model: GPT-4o Transcribe, GPT-4o Mini Transcribe or Whisper v1.
  • Groq: choose a Model: Whisper Large V3 Turbo or Whisper Large V3.

OpenAI and Groq use your API key for that provider. If you haven't added one, click Add Service…. See Groq.

Dictate without the internet

  1. Set Engine to Local (On-device).
  2. Pick a model:
    • Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 (Multilingual) for many languages
    • Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 (English) for English only
  3. Click Download next to it. Each model is about a 2.6 GB download.

Wait until it shows Installed before you record.

To free up space, click Remove next to a model. You can download it again later.

Set the language you speak

With OpenAI or Groq, choose your Language, or leave it on Auto Detect.

Dictate into other apps

To dictate into email, notes or any other app, use Instant Dictation. It uses the speech engine you choose here.

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