Stop typing every Slack message. Hold a key, speak your reply, and send it in seconds.
The average knowledge worker sends 50-70 Slack messages per day. That adds up to thousands of words typed into small message boxes, one character at a time. If you could speak those messages instead, you would save 30 minutes or more every single day.
Steno makes this effortless. Hold a hotkey, speak your reply, release the key, and your words appear in the Slack message field. No app switching, no recording buttons, no extra windows. Just voice to text, right where you need it.
If you have not installed Steno yet, grab it from the home page and follow the 30-second setup guide. Once Steno is running in your menu bar, you are ready to start dictating into Slack.
1Click Into the Slack Message Field
Open Slack (desktop app or browser) and click into the message compose area of the channel, thread, or DM you want to respond to. Your cursor should be blinking in the text input field.
2Hold Your Hotkey and Speak
Press and hold your Steno hotkey (default is Right Option). Speak your reply naturally, as if you were talking to the person face to face. When you are done, release the key.
3Review the Transcription
Steno transcribes your speech and types it into the Slack message field. Take a quick look to make sure everything reads correctly.
4Hit Enter to Send
Once you are happy with the message, press Enter to send it. The entire process takes just a few seconds.
Slack threads are where many important conversations happen, but they are also where typing fatigue hits hardest. You are often crafting longer, more thoughtful replies in threads than in channel messages.
To dictate a thread reply, click the "Reply in thread" button on any message, then click into the reply text field. Hold your hotkey and speak your response. This works identically to channel messages — Steno does not care which text field is active.
"Good point about the deployment timeline. I think we should push the release to next Wednesday to give QA an extra day. I will update the sprint board and let the stakeholders know about the change."
Direct messages on Slack tend to be conversational and informal. Voice dictation is a perfect fit because you are essentially having a spoken conversation, just in text form. Click into any DM conversation, hold your hotkey, and talk as you normally would.
"Hey, are you free for a quick sync at 3? I want to walk through the API changes before the PR review tomorrow."
Sometimes you need to write a substantial message in Slack — a project update, a decision summary, or a detailed technical explanation. For these longer messages, you have two approaches:
Pro tip: For really long updates, draft the message in a text editor first using Steno, then paste it into Slack. This gives you more room to review and edit before sending.
Steno's Smart Rewrite feature is especially useful for Slack messages. After dictating, you can use a voice command to adjust the tone or format of your message. For example, you might dictate a casual thought and then ask Smart Rewrite to make it more professional before sending it to a client channel.
Think before you hold. Take a moment to organize your thoughts, then hold the hotkey and speak. This produces cleaner transcriptions with fewer corrections needed.
Speak in complete sentences. Slack messages read better when they are composed of full sentences rather than fragments. Voice dictation naturally encourages this.
Do not worry about punctuation. Steno automatically adds periods, commas, and question marks based on your speech patterns and pauses.
Use it for standup updates. Daily standups in Slack channels are repetitive typing tasks. Dictate your update in 15 seconds instead of spending 2 minutes typing it out.
Even short replies like "Sounds good, I will take a look this afternoon" are faster to speak than type, especially when you are context-switching between tasks.
Dictate your code review comments in Slack threads. "I noticed the error handling in the auth middleware is not catching token expiration. Can you add a check for expired JWTs and return a 401 instead of letting it fall through to a 500?"
After a meeting, quickly dictate a summary into the relevant Slack channel. "Quick recap from the product sync: we are prioritizing the dashboard redesign for Q2, moving the API migration to Q3, and Sarah is taking point on the user research."
Yes. Steno types text at your active cursor position, so it works with both the Slack desktop app and Slack in any web browser on Mac. It also works with the Slack integration on any platform.
Steno transcribes plain text. You can add Slack markdown formatting (bold, italic, code blocks) after dictation, or use Steno's Smart Rewrite to restructure your message before sending.
Only if you are in an open office. Many remote workers dictate from home offices with no audience at all. In shared spaces, keep your voice at a conversational level and use short dictation bursts. Most people around you will assume you are on a call.
Download Steno and start speaking your messages instead of typing them.
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