Getting started with Glazey on Mac

Glazey is a small menu-bar app. It is made to be as minimalistic as possible. You install it to your Mac, grant two permissions, and you are ready to write with your voice!

This is the whole setup.

1. Download and sign in

Grab the macOS build (Apple silicon, macOS 13 or later). Open the app, sign in, and you’re on the free tier: 1,000 words a week, no card.

Sign-in is how your word count and settings follow you. It’s also how we’ll bring you along when other platforms ship.

2. Microphone, then Accessibility

macOS will ask for two things. Both are real, and both are used narrowly.

Microphone. Glazey has to hear you. That’s the whole input. We use the mic while you’re holding the hotkey, not in the background to listen for a wake word.

Accessibility. This is the one that looks alarming and is, in practice, how any Mac app types on your behalf. Glazey uses it to insert the finished text at your cursor — in Mail, in Slack, in the terminal — so you never copy and paste from a side window. It does not read your screen for fun. It does not drive the pointer. It types the transcript you just made.

You can review both later in System Settings → Privacy & Security.

3. Press FN

That’s the default hotkey. Click into any text field, press it, talk, release.

A few things worth knowing on the first day:

• Talk the way you actually talk. Enhanced mode is built for rambling. You do not need to dictate punctuation out loud.
• The text usually appears in under a second after you let go.
• You can switch to raw mode when you want a word-for-word transcript instead of a cleaned-up one. Pricing spells out which plans include which.
• It needs a network connection. Transcription and cleanup run in the cloud, which is why a tiny menu-bar app can be this accurate without cooking your battery.

If the FN key fights another app, you can change the hotkey clicking on the app icon in the menu bar and selecting “Change hotkey”.

If nothing happens

Most first-run issues are the two permissions. Check that Glazey is enabled under Microphone and Accessibility, then quit and reopen the app. macOS sometimes needs a relaunch before a new Accessibility grant sticks.

If the overlay appears but no text lands, the focused app may not be a real text field — a PDF view, a game, a page that swallowed keyboard input. Click into something you can type in and try again.

Then ignore it

The point of a global hotkey is that you stop thinking about the app. It’s in the menu bar. You press the keys when you want to type something with your voice, and you don’t when you don’t.

If you want company while you get used to it, the Discord is where we hang out. If you want the other platforms first, vote on the wishlist.