Dictate in Linear

Does Linear have built-in dictation?

No. Linear has no built-in speech-to-text, dictation, or voice-typing feature for writing an issue by voice. There is no microphone button on the issue title, none on the description, none on the comment box. There is no voice command and no hidden preference. If you've been combing Settings for it, you can stop. It isn't there.

What does exist is a small market of third-party tools that put "speech to text for Linear" in their headline — Wispr Flow, Voicy, Typeless, and a few others. They're real, and some of them are good, but they're external tools doing exactly what this guide describes: dictating into Linear from outside it. None of them is a feature Linear ships. The distinction matters because people read "voice dictation in Linear" on a marketing page and assume Linear grew a microphone over the weekend. It didn't. The tool sits on top.

There's also Linear's recent push into AI agents — the chat-driven assistant that creates and updates issues from a prompt. That's a different thing from dictation. An agent is you typing or talking an instruction and the AI deciding what to do; dictation is your spoken words landing as the literal text of an issue. Useful, both of them, but if what you want is to talk a bug report into the description field word for word, you want dictation, and that comes from a tool on top of Linear.

Press a hotkey, talk, text lands in the issue

This is the whole mechanic, and it's boring in the best way. You press a hotkey, you speak, you release, and the transcript pastes at your cursor, in whatever text field has focus. Whisper holds a short tail after you let go of the key, so your last word doesn't get clipped. Because it pastes at the OS cursor, a Linear issue field is just "any text box." Desktop app or the browser version, same behaviour.

That's the part the landing pages overcomplicate. There's no Linear integration to authorize, no API token to paste, no webhook to babysit. Your cursor is in the description field, you talk, the words appear in the description field. A small capsule shows up while you speak so you know it's listening:

The hotkey is the one thing worth getting right up front. On Windows it's Ctrl+Space; on Mac it's Command+Option, a modifier-only push-to-talk you hold while speaking. Both are changeable in Settings if they clash with something you already use. (An early user emailed at 2 in the morning because the default hotkey collided with his music software. I shipped customizable hotkeys eight minutes later, which is also how I learned that "it doesn't work" usually means "it conflicts.") If you've ever set up dictation on Windows or on Mac, this is the same muscle memory pointed at a different app.

Set it up in two minutes (Windows or Mac)

You need a Mac on Apple Silicon or a Windows 10-or-newer PC, a working microphone, and Linear open in either the desktop app or the browser. The whole local pipeline is free for any signed-in account, with no payment method asked for at sign-up. Here's the sequence.

The slow part is the model download, not the setup. Everything else is the four steps above. Once it's running, filing an issue stops being a typing task and starts being a talking task — which, when you've got the bug fresh in your head and your hands still on the keyboard, is the difference between capturing it and losing it.

voice to text on Windows · on Mac

Titles, descriptions, and comments by voice

Linear has three places you actually write, and dictation handles all three the same way because they're all text boxes. The title is the short one — a spoken half-sentence, "auth redirect drops the locale on Safari," done. The description is where most people's typing time goes, and where voice earns its keep: you talk through the repro steps, the expected behaviour, the actual behaviour, and let the words pile up faster than you'd type them. Comments are the same move on someone else's ticket — click in, talk, release.

The pattern that works, and the one most heavy voice users land on, is voice for the first draft and the keyboard for the last mile. You dictate the bulk of the description in one breath, then go back with the keyboard for the bits that don't dictate well — a file path, a variable name, a line number, the exact error string. Voice is fast for prose and slow for snake_case; your fingers are the reverse. Use each for what it's good at.

One genuinely nice side effect: because the same hotkey works everywhere, the issue you just dictated into Linear uses the exact same flow as the commit message you'll write five minutes later and the Slack reply you owe your reviewer. One tool, every text field, no relearning when you switch windows. I switch apps roughly forty times an hour and I do not want forty different dictation buttons to remember.

Local or cloud: which mode for your issues

For Linear, local mode is the sensible default. Issue text is internal work — a bug nobody outside the team should see, a roadmap note, a comment about why a customer is unhappy. There's no good reason to route that through someone else's cloud just to type it. If your Mac is Apple Silicon or your PC is from the last few years, local handles everyday dictation without complaint, and cloud becomes the escape hatch rather than the default.

Here's how the three paths differ, because the app makes you pick and I'd rather you pick well:

• Local Parakeet — NVIDIA's TDT engine, around 600 MB, and the fastest local option — 5 to 10 times faster than Whisper on CPU. Covers English plus 24 other European languages, 25 in total. No translate-to-English. If you write your issues in English or another European language, this is the quick, fully offline pick.
• Local Whisper — slower than Parakeet on the same machine, but the multilingual builds cover 99 languages and can translate to English. The English-only builds are English-only, not 99. Pick this for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or any translation work, which Parakeet can't do. Default English model is around 480 MB.
• Cloud (OpenAI, BYOK) — best accuracy and web access, using your own OpenAI key billed straight by OpenAI. Transcription runs on gpt-4o-mini-transcribe by default. Needs internet, so it's the one path that leaves your machine. The Cloud surface is part of Whisper Pro.

The boring truth is that for the kind of text most people put in a Linear issue, local is plenty. Both local engines run fully on your machine with nothing sent to a server. Cloud earns its place when you want top-tier accuracy on a noisy recording or you need the model to pull a fact off the web mid-sentence. For a normal day of filing bugs, start local and only reach for cloud when local leaves you wanting.

Markdown, formatting, and the AI cleanup pass

Raw dictation comes out as a run-on. You say "okay so the login button does nothing on mobile when you tap it the first time but works the second time looks like a state thing," and that's the unpunctuated wall any speech engine hands you. Dropping that straight into an issue description is technically dictation, but nobody wants to read it. Cleaning it up is where the paths diverge.

Windows Voice Typing adds punctuation as you speak, and macOS Dictation handles basic punctuation when you say "comma" or "period." For heavier cleanup — stripping the "ums," fixing the run-ons, turning a spoken ramble into an issue a teammate can actually act on — Whisper can run an AI pass. Say the activation phrase "Hey whisper" and the text gets enhanced before it lands. On a local model that runs through Ollama; in cloud mode it's gpt-5-mini by default.

For Linear's own structure — the markdown the description field supports, the headings, the checklists, the code blocks — the honest answer is that voice gets you the text and Linear's editor gets you the structure. Dictate the repro steps, then type the - for a bullet, the [ ] for a checkbox, or the triple-backtick for a code block the way you always do. No dictation tool conjures markdown out of the air on command; anyone promising "say bullet point and watch it format" is selling you a demo, not a Tuesday. Get the words down fast by voice, shape the markdown with the keys you already know.

That same speak-then-clean flow pays off well beyond Linear — you can also dictate clean prose into any app with the one hotkey, so a long bug report becomes a few spoken sentences instead of a paragraph you type out one-handed between meetings.

When to skip a dictation tool for Linear

Sometimes the right tool is the free one already on your machine, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. If you mostly file short issues — a one-line title, a two-sentence bug — your operating system covers it for nothing.

On Windows, press Windows key + H and the built-in Voice Typing bar opens wherever your cursor is, a Linear field included. It punctuates on its own and is fine for short bursts. The catch: it routes through Microsoft's servers and needs an internet connection, so it isn't an offline option, which matters when your issues describe internal systems. On Mac, Dictation lets you speak to enter text anywhere you can type, set up in System Settings under Keyboard, and on Apple Silicon general text can be processed on-device. For a quick title or a short comment, both are genuinely fine, and I'd rather you used them than installed an app you don't need.

Reach for a dedicated, system-wide tool when the built-ins start hurting: long descriptions, multilingual teams, offline privacy, an AI cleanup pass on a rambled bug report, or wanting one hotkey that behaves the same in Linear, your editor, and your inbox. Below that bar, use what's free. I'm not going to tell you to install an app for a one-line title.

The same trade-off shows up if your team also tracks work in Jira — the logic in dictating into Jira is identical, because both are issue trackers where the cursor, not an integration, is the real connection.

Linear never shipped a microphone button, and after writing this I'm fairly sure it won't bother. It doesn't need to, because the cursor is the integration. Talk into the field, get text, shape the markdown with the keys you already know. I dictated most of this guide into a text box that wasn't Linear, with a tool that doesn't care which box it is, then filed two real bugs the same way before lunch. That's the whole trick.