AKnght2Write | Dictation for novelists, entirely on your phone

How it goes

Dictate. Listen. Revise.

Wherever you are, talk

On a walk, behind the wheel, or lying in bed: hold the button, or click a remote, and say the scene. Sentences arrive whole, with their punctuation. A long pause becomes a paragraph.

Later, listen

Press play and hear the chapter read to you, sentence by sentence. The ear catches what the eye forgives.

Then fix it, by voice or by hand

Say replace water with river, or tap a paragraph and type. Whatever you change is one undo away.

On the device

It works in airplane mode. For good.

The speech model ships inside the app and runs on the phone’s own processor. There is no account to make, no server to reach and nothing to upload. On Android, AKnght2Write does not even request permission to use the internet. It could not send your book anywhere if it wanted to.

No sign-up, no login, no cloud
No ads, no analytics, no telemetry of its own
The only thing that ever touches a network is the app store, and only if you subscribe

Where your words go

Your voice spoken

Your phone heard and written

Your folder kept as plain text

Somebody else’s computer: not involved.

The cast list

It learns how to spell Amyra.

Ordinary dictation hears an invented name and writes the nearest real one. AKnght2Write keeps a cast list for each book and tells the recognizer what to listen for.

You do not have to fill it in first. Correct a name by hand once, and it offers to remember. The list builds itself out of ordinary writing, and each book keeps its own.

Remember “Amyra”? It heard “Amira”. NoRemember

Without the cast list1 of 5 names

Amira, Ijeart, Sami, Kaitlyn…

With it5 of 5 names

Amyra, Idurt, Saimi, Kaitlin, Calbert

Our own measurement: the same recording through the same model, with the cast list off and then on. It was taken with synthesized voices reading a prepared passage, so treat it as the shape of the result rather than a promise about your voice.

Made for fiction

Dialogue lands as dialogue.

In Author mode, quotation marks come out curled and a new speaker starts a new paragraph. The recognizer decides what is dialogue from your tone of voice, and a flat reading can fool it. When it misses a line, say quote that and the last thing you said is wrapped in quotation marks.

Writing something that is not fiction? Standard mode writes what it hears and adds no quotation mark you did not ask for. The mode is remembered for each document.

You say

we should go now said Amyra

Calbert did not move before the light

On the page

“We should go now,” said Amyra.

Calbert did not move. “Before the light?”

Built to be trusted

Your words are saved before they are understood.

Every utterance is written to the phone’s storage the moment you stop talking, and deleted only once its words are on the page. If the phone closes the app mid-sentence, the recording is still there, and it is written down the next time you open it.

And you never wait. Keep talking while the last sentence is still being worked out; everything lands in the order you said it.

What happens to a sentence

You stop talkingThe button is free again at once.
The recording is savedBefore anything else is tried.
It is turned into wordsIn the order spoken, however many are waiting.
The words are on the pageOnly now is the recording deleted.

Interrupted anywhere along the way, it picks up from the saved recording at the next launch.

Eyes up

Made for a phone that stays in your pocket.

Pair a cheap Bluetooth camera remote, a ring or a foot pedal and give each button a job: dictate, new paragraph, undo, read back. Click to start, click again to send, double-click to throw a bad take away.

A buzz and a tone tell you it heard you, because no animation reaches a pocket. A Bluetooth headset can be the microphone.

A command it could not make out feels different: a heavier buzz and a falling tone, and nothing is written. Click the same button and say it again.

The Bluetooth screen: a remote’s buttons shown as tiles, each with its job: Dictate, New paragraph, Undo, No, Yes, Cancel, Hold to talk, Read back.

Yours to keep

Your book is a folder of plain text.

A project is a folder. Its documents are Markdown files that open in anything, back up however you like, and sync with whatever you already use. On Android you choose the folder, and it outlives the app: uninstall, reinstall, point at the same folder, and every project is back.

When it is time to move to your word processor, Copy puts the whole manuscript on the clipboard and Send hands it to any app that takes text or a file.

On your phone’s storage

The Drowned Road/
├─ The Drowned Road.md
├─ Notes.md
├─ Chapters/
│  ├─ Chapter 1.md
│  └─ Chapter 2.md
├─ Scratch/
└─ TextReplacements.md  cast list

Where was I?

Every sentence has a number you can say.

Finding a spot by its words means hoping the recognizer hears the same phrase the same way twice. A number read off the page has no such problem. Say go to 5 and carry on from the end of sentence five.

The numbers start again with each chapter, so they stay short enough to say out loud. They are only drawn on the screen and are never part of your text.

Amyra went down to the water before the light came. The horses had been standing in the rain since the middle of the night. She did not speak to them.

Calbert had not slept. He watched the road from the gate, and said nothing to anyone who passed. The bell rang twice.

Voice commands

A short list of commands, and one promise.

Hold Command and say what you want done. The list is short and fixed on purpose: nothing is guessing at what you meant, so the same words do the same thing every time.

If a command is not understood, nothing is changed and nothing is written. The app says so, marks the place, and keeps the recording so you can hear it. Say it again, write the words down after all, or toss them. Your words are never lost.

Cannot lose writing
One “undo” away
Asks before it deletes

Structure

new paragraph: Start a new paragraph
new line: Break the line without starting a paragraph
join paragraphs: Put this paragraph back onto the one above
new chapter <title>: Start a chapter

Punctuation

period: Or “full stop”
comma · question mark: And “exclamation mark”
open quote · close quote: “End quote” and “unquote” work too
em dash: The long dash, for a line that gets cut off

Moving about

go to <n>: Write from the end of a numbered sentence
go to 0: Write from the start of this chapter
go to chapter <n>: Jump to a chapter
go to top · go to end: The beginning, or where you left off

Selecting and capitals

select last word: Or “sentence”, or “paragraph”
select <phrase>: The last time you wrote that phrase
capitalize that: Also “all caps that” and “lowercase that”

Undoing and fixing

undo · redo: Take the last thing back, or put it back
scratch that: Delete what you selected, or what you just said
quote that: Put quotation marks around what you selected, or what you just said
replace <x> with <y>: Swap one phrase for another

Deleting

delete last word: Or “delete last sentence”
delete last <n> sentences: Several at once, so it asks
delete this paragraph: It quotes the opening words back to you first
delete chapter <n> · clear everything: Asks, tells you the word count, and one undo brings it back

Prose cannot delete anything

While you are dictating, the only commands that work are the ones that add something: a new paragraph, a new line, punctuation. Nothing that removes writing can be set off by a sentence of your story, and a sentence that merely contains “new paragraph” is just a sentence.

When a character has to say it

Say literally new paragraph and the words themselves are written down. It is the escape hatch for the day somebody in your book dictates a letter.

A closer look

Quiet where you write. Organized where you keep it.

The Library: a project card, its documents with word counts, and the chapters of the open document listed beneath it. — **The Library**Projects, folders, documents and chapters on one map, each with its word count.

Settings: the writing mode, Author or Standard, above folded sections for Visuals, Gamification, Bluetooth, While you write and The caret. — **Settings that fold**The writing mode on top, everything else one tap away, and the master switches work while shut.

The Bluetooth screen, with each remote shown as a card of button tiles. — **Buttons**Every remote is a card of tiles. Press a button to add it, tap its tile to give it a job.

Words that arrive

New words land with a small flourish, so a glance tells you it heard. Pick from five (a shockwave, a comet, a stamp, a volley of dots, a drop) or none.

A daily goal, if you want one

A quiet meter counts the day’s words toward a target you set. Undo a sentence and it counts back down, because it follows the manuscript, not your ego. Off with one switch.

A paragraph is a button

Dialogue needs a new paragraph at every turn, and saying so each time is slow. The ¶ button does it instantly, with the same undo as the spoken command.

By design

What it deliberately does not do.

It will not rewrite you

There is no language model in AKnght2Write. “Tighten this paragraph” is out of scope on purpose. It writes down what you said; the prose stays yours.

It will not guess

Mishearing prose as a command could destroy writing, so nothing it does not recognize is ever acted on. A command it cannot make out leaves your page exactly as it was, and waits in the margin with its recording until you say it again, keep the words, or toss them.

It will not phone home

No accounts, no usage statistics, no server of ours for anything. We could not tell you how many words you wrote yesterday, and we like it that way.

It will not hold your writing hostage

Plain files in your own folder, and export in one tap. Every document opens, types, reads back and exports whether you subscribe or not. The one thing a subscription adds is dictating in more than one of them.

Pricing

Dictate one book free. Subscribe to dictate them all.

Free

One documentto dictate in, for as long as you like

A whole novel fits: chapters are unlimited
Past 2,000 dictated words in a week, a reminder shows now and then. Dictation never stops
Every other document still opens, types, reads back and exports
No account, no card

Everywhere

Monthly or yearlythrough Google Play or the App Store

Dictate in every document: notes, scratch pads, the next book
No reminders, however much you dictate
No login: the subscription belongs to your store account
Keeps working offline between renewals

Prices will be announced when the app reaches the stores. Without a subscription, pressing Dictate in any other document opens nothing and says so at once, with a buzz and a tone, so nothing you say is ever lost to a microphone that was not listening.

Where it stands

It is not in the stores yet.

AKnght2Write runs today on our own Android phone, iPhone and desktop, and we are working toward a release on Google Play and the App Store. If you would like to test it early, or just want to hear when it is out, write to us.

Ask to test it Who makes it

Questions

Asked, and answered.

Does it need the internet?

No. Recognition, read-back and editing all run on the device and keep working in airplane mode indefinitely. The only thing that ever uses a connection is the app store, to confirm a subscription if you have one.

What is free, exactly?

Dictation in one document, for as long as you like, chapters and all. Past 2,000 dictated words in a week the app reminds you now and then that a subscription exists, and carries on listening. Typing, editing, read-back and export are free in every document.

What happens if I cancel a subscription?

Everything you wrote stays yours and stays open. Dictation goes back to your free document; the others you can still type in, listen to and export.

Is this AI?

The listening is. Speech recognition uses Whisper, an open-source speech model released by OpenAI, run on the phone itself by the open-source whisper.cpp. The writing is not: there is no language model, nothing generates or “improves” your text, and commands are matched against a fixed list.

What happens when it mishears a command?

Nothing is written and nothing is changed, so there is nothing to undo. You feel a buzz and hear a falling tone, and a small mark appears in the margin where you gave the command. Say it again and it runs. Later, tap the mark to hear the recording, write the words down where you said them, or toss them. Anything too long to have been a command is simply written down, so a paragraph said with the wrong button still lands in your book.

Which languages does it understand?

English, for now. The speech model bundled with the app is English-only.

Why is the download so large?

Because the speech model comes inside the app, about a third of a gigabyte in all. The alternatives were a download on first run or sending your voice to a server, and we wanted neither.

How fast is it?

On a Galaxy S21 Ultra, a sentence is on the page about a second and a half after you stop talking. You never wait for it, though: keep dictating while earlier sentences are being written down, and they land in the order you said them.

What about hands-free?

Hands-free dictation with a wake word is built and works in our testing, but it is not switched on in the phone app yet. Holding a button, or clicking a remote, is more dependable when you are on the move, so that came first.

Can I get my writing out?

Always. It is already plain Markdown in a folder; Copy puts the whole manuscript on the clipboard, and Send hands it to any app that takes text or a file. A draft edited elsewhere can be dropped back in.

What is your privacy policy?

Short, because there is little to say: the app collects nothing. Read it here.

A first draft, wherever you are.