Say a Phrase, Type the Whole Thing
Some text is tedious to say and easy to get wrong: email addresses, long links, your address, a standard reply. Snippets let you save it once and type it by voice. While dictating, say the snippet’s trigger phrase and VocaMac types the saved text in its place.
Add a Snippet
- Open Settings → Snippets (under Writing).
- Click Add Snippet….
- Enter a Trigger Phrase, such as “my mail”, and the Expansion Text, such as your email address.
- Dictate as usual. “Send it to my mail” comes out with your address in place of “my mail”.
Once you have more than a handful, a search box appears so you can find one quickly.
How Matching Works
- Whole words, any case. “My Mail”, “my mail” and “MY MAIL” all match; “mymailbox” does not.
- Longest trigger wins. If you have both “my mail” and “my mail work”, saying the longer one types the longer snippet.
- Your text stays exact. Expanded text is protected from later formatting and transcript cleanup, so a link or address is never “corrected”.
- Every engine. Snippets work with Whisper, Parakeet, Apple Speech and the ONNX models. They are skipped only for a dictation set to come out exactly as transcribed, with no formatting at all.
Snippets, Replacements or Vocabulary?
VocaMac has three ways to shape the words it types:
| Use | For | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Snippets | Typing a block of saved text from a short spoken phrase | “my sign-off” → a three-line signature |
| Replacements | Fixing a word the model keeps mishearing | “get hub” → GitHub |
| Vocabulary | Getting names and jargon spelled right | Grafana, kubectl |
Replacements and Vocabulary live on the Dictionary page; see Custom Vocabulary.
Private and Portable
Snippets are stored on your Mac and never uploaded. They are included when you use Export Settings… on the Application page, so you can move them to another Mac along with the rest of your preferences.
Ready to try Snippets?
Install VocaMac