Most people find this page in the same way. Something in the hands, wrists or forearms started hurting a while ago, it got worse, and now a normal working day is a problem to be managed. The deadline did not move.

This is a practical guide to getting a Mac to work without your hands. It is written by someone who built a dictation app because typing had started to hurt, so take the obvious bias into account — but the useful half of this page is the part that has nothing to do with our software.

One thing first, and only once: get it looked at by a doctor or a hand therapist. Hand and arm pain has many causes, some of which get much worse if you work through them, and none of which are diagnosable from a web page. Software changes how you work. It is not treatment.

Start with what is already on the Mac

Before spending anything, spend an afternoon with what you have. Two features, both free, both better than their reputations.

Voice Control

System Settings → Accessibility → Voice Control. This is the serious one. It is a full hands-free layer for the whole machine — clicking, navigating, scrolling, dictating, plus a grid system for hitting anything that does not have a name. You can define your own commands.

If your hands are bad enough that the keyboard is largely out, this is where to begin, and it costs nothing. It takes a couple of days to stop feeling ridiculous and it is far more capable than most people discover, because most people turn it on, say something to it, get a wrong result, and turn it off again.

Keyboard dictation

The microphone key. Good recognition, particularly on recent Apple silicon Macs where it runs on the machine. It ends the session when you pause, though, which makes long-form writing an exercise in not thinking — more on that here.

The parts nobody mentions

Dictation guides talk about accuracy. Accuracy is not the hard part.

Composing out loud is a separate skill. Writing by voice is not writing with your hands, and the first week is genuinely bad. Sentences come out shapeless. You lose your thread. People who have dictated for years mostly say it took them a month to stop noticing — and that they now think out loud faster than they ever typed. Do not judge it on day two, and do not start with the most important document you own.

Correction is the whole game. A tool that transcribes well but makes you reach for the keyboard to fix one wrong name has not saved your hands. It has moved the work. When you try anything, test it on a proper mess: a name it will not know, a technical term, a sentence you want to rewrite halfway through. How you fix that is the difference between hands-free and mostly hands-free, and mostly is what hurts.

Your voice gets tired. Nobody warns you. Dictating for four hours is physically tiring in a way typing is not, and if you are already dealing with pain and fatigue that matters. Drink water, and do not plan to talk for eight hours because you cannot type for eight hours.

The microphone matters more than the software. More than people want to hear, given they have just spent money on an app. Any decent wired headset microphone, positioned close and off to the side of your mouth, will beat a better model listening through your laptop's built-in mic from half a metre away. Avoid Bluetooth headsets for this: when they switch into microphone mode the audio quality collapses, and so does the accuracy.

Things that are not dictation but help

• A foot pedal. A cheap USB pedal mapped to your dictation key means starting and stopping costs nothing from your hands. This is the single best twenty pounds in this whole guide, and it comes up constantly among people who work this way.
• Eye or head tracking for the pointer. Voice for text and something else for the mouse is a much better division of labour than trying to move a cursor by voice.
• Text expansion. Everything you never have to say again is a thing you never have to say again.
• Genuinely fewer keystrokes. Turn off the notifications that make you click, unsubscribe from what makes you type. Some of the load is not work.

What dictation will not fix

It will not fix the mouse. Pointing and clicking is a large share of the damage for a lot of people, and voice is a poor pointer. Voice Control's grid helps and is still slower than a hand.

It will not make code comfortable. Dictating prose is a solved problem; dictating punctuation-dense code is not, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not shipped much that way. Serious programmers working hands-free tend to use custom command grammars built up over a long time, and it is a project rather than an afternoon.

And it will not fix the underlying thing. See the first section again.

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Where Mynato fits

It exists because of this exact problem — it was built in a week by someone whose hands had started hurting, before there was any thought of selling it.

• It does not stop when you pause. Hold a key while you talk, or open a continuous session that stays open through every silence, for as long as you want.
• You can correct by voice. Fix a word, scratch the last thing you said, without your hands.
• It types where your cursor already is, in whatever app you were using. Nothing to copy, nothing to switch to.
• The audio never leaves your Mac. No upload, no account required to dictate, works with the Wi-Fi off.
• The free tier does not expire, and basic dictation stays free permanently. That is deliberate: nobody should lose the thing keeping them working because of a billing problem.

It needs an Apple silicon Mac and macOS 13 or later. If money is the obstacle, write to us — a person reads it.

And if the free tools do the job, use the free tools. The point is that you can work today.