Loorq

Loorq is a dictation app that also tells you how you sound.

Press a key, speak, release. Your words land at the cursor in whatever app you

are already in: an email, a doc, a code comment, a Slack message. That part

works like good dictation should, on-device and fast enough that you stop

thinking about it.

The difference is what happens underneath. While Loorq is transcribing, it is

also listening for the way you speak. Every "um" and "uh". Every "like" that

starts a sentence over. The "you know" you drop in when you are buying a

second to think. It counts them, timestamps them, and shows you the shape of

how you talked, without ever putting a single one of them into the text you

just dictated.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY HEARS

Filler sounds are the easy part, and Loorq catches them with a purpose-built

acoustic model rather than string matching, so a mumbled "uh" is caught even

when a transcript would have swallowed it.

Crutch phrases are the hard part, because they are real words. Loorq reads

context: the "like" that begins a restart, a fluent "you know", an "I don't

know" used as a stall, plus "so", "okay", "well", "actually", "basically" and

"right" when they are doing filler work instead of real work.

WHAT IT REFUSES TO DO

Most tools that count filler words are annoying because they are wrong. They

flag "I like what I see" and "so much better" and "you know what?" and you

stop believing the number.

Loorq is built around one rule that never bends: never accuse you of a filler

that was a real word. When a phrase is genuinely ambiguous, it undercounts on

purpose. The number you see is a floor, and you can trust it.

The other rule: your dictated text is yours. Crutch words are shown to you as

feedback, never quietly deleted from what you actually said. Loorq cleans up

the mechanics of dictation, not your meaning.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR MAC

There is no cloud step. The models run locally on Apple Silicon. Your audio

lives in memory for as long as it takes to transcribe and is never written to

disk unencrypted, never uploaded, never used to train anything. Loorq only

ever listens to your own microphone, and only after you ask it to, with a

keypress or an explicitly started session. No account required to try it.

THE COACHING PART

After each take, a small card shows what happened: your words, your pace, your

pauses, and any crutches, laid out on the waveform exactly where you said them.

Tap one to hear yourself say it. It is a surprisingly effective thing to do

once.

The dashboard turns that into a trend. Not a vanity score, just whether the

thing you are working on is moving. Most people find they have one or two

signature crutches rather than a general problem, and those are the ones worth

knowing about.

You can put any word on a watchlist and Loorq will keep count. People use it

for a swear jar, for a hedge they are trying to drop ("I think maybe"), or for

a filler that is theirs alone and on nobody else's list.

MEETINGS

Start a session before a call and Loorq listens the same way, on-device, and

gives you the counts afterward. It stores numbers, not words: your meeting is

not transcribed and not stored. Practice mode, called Sidecar, is the same

loop without the meeting, for a talk you are rehearsing or an interview answer

you keep fumbling.

IT LIVES IN THE MENU BAR

Loorq stays out of the way. Dictation shows up as a small pill near the notch

while you speak and disappears when you are done. There is no window to manage

and nothing to keep open.

TRY IT

Three days, every feature on, no account and no card. If you keep it, it is a

one-time purchase. No subscription, and updates arrive in the app.

REQUIREMENTS

macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon. Loorq needs microphone access to hear you

and accessibility access to type at your cursor, and it asks for each one at

the moment it first needs it.