Voice typing for Linear on Mac.
The title is never the problem. The description is, and an empty description is a meeting somebody has to hold next week.
The empty description problem
Look at the last twenty issues in any tracker. The titles are fine. A good proportion of the descriptions are blank, or one line that repeats the title, or a screenshot with no words around it. That is not carelessness: it is what happens when the person filing has the whole picture in their head and forty seconds of patience for typing it.
The cost lands later and lands on somebody else. Whoever picks it up asks in a channel, waits, gets half an answer, and makes assumptions. All of that was avoidable with three sentences at the moment of filing, when the context was free.
How it works
Hold it to talk, tap it to toggle, Escape cancels. Pick the key in Settings.
There is nothing to install on the Linear side, and the desktop app and a browser tab behave identically.
- Put the cursor in the description, the comment or the title.
- Hold your shortcut, which you chose in Settings during setup.
- Say what happened, what you expected, and what you already ruled out.
- Let go. The text lands in about a fifth of a second, punctuated.
Linear's markdown still applies to what arrives, so a line starting with a dash becomes a bullet exactly as if you had typed it.
What a dictated issue contains that a typed one does not
- What you were doing when it happened, rather than just what broke.
- The thing you already tried, which stops the next person repeating it.
- Why the obvious fix is wrong, if you already know.
- Who cares about this and what they asked for.
- The version, the environment, and the one detail that will turn out to matter.
None of that is hard to know. All of it is slow to type and fast to say.
Project updates, which are the same problem at a larger size
A weekly project update is four sentences that everybody wants and nobody writes. Said out loud it takes half a minute, and it is the difference between a project that is legible from outside and one that requires a meeting to understand.
Names and terms
Trackers are full of service names, customer names and internal tools. Turn on the developer tools vocabulary pack for the common ground, then correct anything else once with Teach and it is heard your way from then on, with the correction kept on your Mac.
Related: dictation for developers, dictating into Slack, and dictating into Notion.
Does this work in the Linear desktop app?
Yes, and in a browser tab, identically. Zumbo types where the cursor is rather than integrating with an application.
Where does it help most?
The issue description. Titles are already short enough to type; descriptions are where the useful detail either exists or does not, and they are the thing that gets left empty.
Will it keep Linear's keyboard shortcuts working?
Yes. Your shortcut is one key held while you talk; everything else in Linear behaves exactly as before, including its own markdown handling of the text that arrives.
Can I dictate a comment on someone else's issue?
Yes. Comments, descriptions, titles, project updates and the search box are all just fields with a cursor.
Is any of this uploaded to be transcribed?
No. The speech engine ships inside the app and composes on your Mac.
Free for 3 days, everything unlocked. Then $15 once. macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon.