Introduction

Meet Confer

Confer is a native macOS dictation app designed to make speech to text a natural and intuitive part of your workflow. It provides a fast, configurable, and unobtrusive experience that fits cleanly into the way you work.

Confer is built with consistency, reliability, and accuracy in mind. Repeated failed or low quality transcriptions are frustrating, so Confer is designed to minimize those interruptions and make voice input feel dependable day to day.

Play demo

Built specifically for macOS, Confer takes advantage of platform capabilities to deliver a polished, integrated experience. Whether you are a developer, student, creator, or professional in another field, Confer is designed to work naturally alongside the tools and workflows you already use.

Why Confer?

Confer streams your audio to frontier speech models while you talk, instead of running a small model on your Mac. That means better accuracy on names, jargon, and accents, and no waiting for a model to load. Even without a prompt, Confer cleans up punctuation, capitalization, and filler words before pasting.

If a dictation can't be transcribed, Confer keeps the recording for 24 hours so you can retry it from the Transcriptions view instead of saying it all again.

Three ways to dictate

Some tasks call for a simple press and release flow that lets you dictate quickly and move on. Other times you want to keep the microphone open and work out loud, with Confer pasting each finished thought as you go. Confer provides three ways to dictate:

• Quick dictation. Hold the fn key, speak, and release. The finished text is pasted in one write.
• Anchored dictation. Press Option + Space to start and press it again to finish, so you don't have to hold a key. You can pick a prompt or microphone while you talk.
• Dictation sessions. Press Option + D to start a session. Confer keeps listening, finishes each thought when you pause, and types it into the app you are using.

Each mode is configurable. Prompts, paste behavior, and dictionaries can all be tailored to fit your workflow, and every shortcut can be changed.

App features

Alongside the recording panel, Confer includes a companion app for managing your workflow. Open it from the Confer icon in the menu bar by choosing Open Confer. The sidebar is split into two sections:

• Workspace: Home, Transcriptions, Dictation Sessions, and Stats.
• Configure: Prompts, Apps, and Dictionary.

Settings lives at the bottom of the sidebar, or press Cmd + ,.

Installation

If you haven't already installed Confer, download it. The first time you open it, Confer walks you through a short setup:

1. Welcome. A quick introduction to holding fn to dictate.
2. Permissions. Grant Microphone access so Confer can capture audio, and Accessibility access so it can type transcriptions into the app you are writing in. Both are required.
3. Try it out. Try a dictation before you subscribe. You can skip this step.
4. Start your free trial. Choose a yearly or monthly plan and continue to checkout. Every plan starts with a free 7 day trial. Checkout emails you a 16 character license code. Paste it into Confer to finish, so there is no account or password to create.

A license can be active on two Macs at a time. Confer updates itself automatically, so you are always on the latest version. Next, learn how recording works in more detail.