Short answer: click into your terminal, press ⌃+⌥+R (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+R (Windows/Linux), speak the commit body, agent prompt, or heredoc content, then press the hotkey again. AICHE inserts clean text right at the cursor.
What This Is Actually For
Nobody dictates shell commands. Commands are short and exact by design. You type them.
What the terminal is increasingly full of is prose: prompts to AI coding agents waiting for instructions, commit message bodies that explain why, README sections written into a heredoc, script headers nobody fills in because typing them is a chore. That is what voice input solves.
AI Coding Agents In Your Terminal
Claude Code, Aider, GitHub Copilot CLI, and similar tools live in the terminal. You send them 40 to 60 prompts a day. Each one that deserves real context - the existing patterns, the constraints, the edge cases, what not to touch - takes three to five minutes to type. Most developers trim the prompt to save time, then pay for it in extra correction loops.
Press the hotkey, walk through the requirement out loud, press it again. AICHE drops a full prompt at the input line. You hit Enter.
Math: speaking lands around 150 WPM. Typing in a terminal prompt lands around 40 WPM. A 200-word context block that takes five minutes to type takes about 80 seconds to speak.
How It Works
- Open your terminal (Terminal.app, iTerm2, Ghostty, Warp, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, GNOME Terminal, Konsole, Windows Terminal, tmux inside any of them).
- Place the cursor where text should land. For an agent prompt, that is the input line. For a commit, type
git commit -m "and leave the quote open. For a heredoc, open the block and leave the cursor on the empty line inside. - Press ⌃+⌥+R on Mac or Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows/Linux.
- Speak. The recording is a toggle, not push-to-talk.
- Press the same hotkey to stop. AICHE transcribes, cleans, and pastes at the cursor.
- Close the quote or heredoc, then run the command.
No plugin. No shell hook. No terminal-specific configuration.
Git Commit Messages Without The Pain
Conventional Commits, multi-paragraph bodies, and BREAKING CHANGE footers are easy to say and tedious to type. Type git commit -m ", press the hotkey, speak the message - subject line, blank line, body paragraph, footer. AICHE inserts a clean block. Close the quote, hit Enter.
If you prefer the editor flow (git commit with no -m), the same thing works inside Vim or nano. Drop into insert mode, press the hotkey, speak the message, press it again. AICHE inserts at the cursor.
For people who rebase a lot, this is the difference between writing a useful body on every commit versus reaching for --amend later because the original message was three words.
README And Heredoc Documentation
Anything you would normally paste into a terminal is something you can dictate instead:
cat > README.md <<'EOF'
EOF
Place the cursor on the blank line between the markers, press the hotkey, dictate the install steps, architecture notes, and environment variables, stop the recording, save. A document that nobody was going to write now exists.
This matters most when you are on a fresh machine or a remote box without your editor configured. Dictating a 40-line setup doc into a new project is faster than switching windows and copying from somewhere else.
Terminal Editors
If your workflow involves editing in Vim, Neovim, or nano inside the terminal, dictation works there too. In Vim: enter insert mode, press the hotkey, speak, press it again, then Esc to return to normal mode. In nano: place the cursor and dictate. AICHE inserts at the cursor of whatever has focus.
This makes script headers, inline comments above complex pipelines, and architecture notes in Markdown files cheap enough that you actually write them.
Tmux, Zellij, And Multiplexers
AICHE inserts into the focused text field, not into a specific app. A tmux pane behaves like any other input. Same for zellij, screen, and multiplexers built into Warp or Ghostty. If your cursor is in a pane running a remote shell, the text goes into that remote shell.
Transcription runs on your local machine. The result is sent as keystrokes into the active pane. The remote host just sees text arrive.
For Non-English Thinkers
Turn on Auto-translation in AICHE settings. Speak in German, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, or whichever language your brain runs commit messages in. AICHE outputs English. The git log stays consistent for your teammates and your future self.
Common Questions
Q: Which terminals work?
A: All of them. Terminal.app, iTerm2, Ghostty, Warp, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, Hyper, GNOME Terminal, Konsole, xterm, Windows Terminal, ConEmu. AICHE inserts text into the focused OS-level text field, which is what every terminal exposes for the prompt.
Q: Does it work inside tmux, zellij, and screen?
A: Yes. The pane is the focused field as far as the OS is concerned. Same for multiplexers built into Warp or Ghostty.
Q: Does it work in an SSH session?
A: Yes. Transcription runs on your local machine, then AICHE types the result into the active pane. The remote host sees keystrokes arrive.
Q: Will it mangle code-heavy speech, like API names and snake_case?
A: Turn on the Software Development profile (Pro). It is tuned for kebab-case flags, snake_case identifiers, and common library and API names. Turn smart quotes off in settings so the output does not produce curly quotes that break shell parsing.
Q: Can I dictate into Vim or nano during git commit?
A: Yes. Drop into insert mode (Vim) or just place the cursor (nano), press the hotkey, speak. AICHE inserts at the cursor like it would anywhere else.
Q: Linux with Wayland - does the global hotkey work?
A: Yes. Ctrl+Alt+R works on both X11 and Wayland.
Result: the commits, prompts, and docs you used to half-write because typing them was a chore now arrive in seconds. The git log gets useful again. The agents get the context they need to give you working code on the first try.
Try it now: stage some changes, run git commit -m ", press your hotkey, and spend 60 seconds saying out loud why the change exists, what it touches, and what a future maintainer needs to know. Close the quote, hit Enter.