Voice In

Voice In is a Chrome and Edge extension that drops dictation into whatever text field you are already typing in — a Google Doc, a Notion page, a Gmail draft — across 10,000+ supported sites. No separate window, no paste step. It carries 600,000+ Chrome Web Store users at 4.4/5 from roughly 2,800 ratings.

What You Get#

• Dictation in place: Click into a text box on a supported site, press the shortcut, talk. Text lands at the cursor.
• 10,000+ sites, plus ~1,000 more on Plus: Advanced Mode, a Plus-only feature, unlocks the extra list.
• 50+ languages and 100 dialects: The vendor's languages page states both — the 100 counts dialects, not a second language total. Voice commands cover 21–25 languages.
• Custom voice commands (Plus): Map a spoken phrase to another phrase or an action. Text replacement and automation, not vocabulary training — see Limitations.
• AudioScribe: Alt+S opens Dictanote's AI layer, which rewrites a spoken note into clean prose using ChatGPT. It is a separate subscription, not a Voice In Plus feature.

Who It's For#

• Authors who draft in the browser: If the manuscript lives in Google Docs or Notion, this is dictation without changing where you work.
• Chromebook writers: ChromeOS has no Dragon, MacWhisper or Wispr Flow. A Chrome extension is the realistic option.

Pricing: Free tier allows 60 minutes of dictation per day, without Advanced Mode or custom commands. Plus is $9.99/month or $59.99/year; a $149.99 lifetime licence is framed on the site as available "until August 25th." All three are higher than in May 2026 ($7.99/mo, $39.99/yr, $99.99 lifetime), and no changelog records the increase. AudioScribe, sold as Dictanote Pro, bills separately at $8/month or $60/year.

Strengths#

• Actively maintained: v4.47 shipped 5 August 2026, after June and July releases that fixed punctuation and spacing across six languages and repaired paste handling in Notion, Slack and X.
• Voice In itself never receives your audio: The privacy policy and the Chrome Web Store data-safety panel both state audio and transcripts are neither sent to nor stored on Voice In's servers. That claim is true — see below for what it does not mean.

Limitations#

• "Processed locally" is the vendor's phrasing, and it is misleading. The privacy policy reads: "All audio processing is conducted locally using the browser's native speech-to-text capabilities, specifically through Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge." That capability is the Web Speech API, which streams audio to Google's servers in Chrome and Microsoft's in Edge. Nothing is transcribed on your machine. The tell: it does not run in Brave, Opera or Arc — all Chromium — because only Chrome and Edge expose that cloud service.
• Browser tabs only, and no offline mode. No desktop Scrivener, Word or Ulysses; Dictanote's download page states it has no Play Store app either.
• No custom vocabulary for invented names. The "Special Words" dictionary that teaches spellings sits in AudioScribe, behind the separate subscription. Custom commands do not train recognition. For fantasy and SF drafting, this is the gap that matters most.
• Recurring billing complaints. Trustpilot's rating for dictanote.co is too small and inconsistent to quote, but one pattern recurred: customers charged monthly after an annual plan lapsed, no self-serve cancellation, slow refund responses.

Alternatives#

Speechnotes uses the same browser speech engine at about $23/year, but it is a standalone notepad — dictate, then paste — so in-place typing is the whole difference. Google Docs Voice Typing is free and Docs-only. If dictation must reach desktop apps, Wispr Flow, Superwhisper and MacWhisper are all system-wide. Only the latter two transcribe on-device, though — Wispr Flow is cloud-only, so it moves your audio off your machine just as surely.