Parla
Parla for iPhone
A keyboard thatlistens through your Mac.
Switch to the Parla keyboard in any app — Messages, Mail, WhatsApp, Notes — tap the mic and speak. The audio goes to your own Mac, which recognises it, cleans it up and sends the text back to the cursor.
How it works
Pair once, then just talk
Pair with your Mac
On the Mac, Settings → Phone shows a QR code. Scan it with Parla on the iPhone. The code carries the Mac's addresses and a key made for that one phone.
Tap the mic and speak
A strip above the keys shows the words as your Mac hears them. Tap the mic again when you are done.
The text is already there
Cleaned up, punctuated, names spelled properly, inserted at the cursor. The keys are right there for any quick correction.
The honest part
On iOS, a keyboard is not allowed to hear you
Apple does not let keyboards use the microphone. Every voice keyboard has to work around that, and it is better to say how than to pretend it is not there.
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The Parla app holds the microphone
The keyboard is the part you see; the app is the part that records. They talk to each other on the phone, and the keyboard itself makes no network connections.
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With a session on, the mic answers at once
Start a session from the app, the Action Button or Control Center, and Parla stays ready in the background. The mic key then works immediately, and you never leave the app you are typing in. A session ends by itself after a quiet spell, and shortly after the phone locks.
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Without one, there is a short detour
If Parla is not running, the mic key opens it and recording starts straight away. Swipe back to where you were and the text is inserted. It is one swipe, and the keyboard tells you so.
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The battery cost is measured, not guessed
Each session reads the phone's own battery gauge, and the Settings tab shows what it actually cost — so the session length can be chosen on evidence.
At home and away
The phone tries every road to your Mac at once
The pairing code lists every name the Mac answers to. The phone races them: on home Wi-Fi the local name wins in milliseconds; anywhere else, your private Tailscale network does. Neither waits for the other to fail.
It stays connected
A small keepalive every twenty seconds. When a session is on and you move from Wi-Fi to mobile data, the connection finds its way back by itself.
It fails out loud
If the Mac disappears mid-sentence, you get a clear message rather than a spinner that never ends. The Settings tab shows which route is in use.
The Mac wakes the model for you
To stay light, the Mac unloads the speech model after half an hour unused. The phone asks for it the moment the keyboard appears, so the few seconds of reloading are normally over before you speak.
One dictation at a time
The Mac serves its own hotkey and your phone from the same engine. If you are already dictating at the desk, the phone is told so instead of getting a garbled mix.
Small things that matter
Built for the way you actually type on a phone
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Light · Polish · Off, remembered per field
The switch above the keys sets the style for that dictation and remembers its position for that kind of field. Fields with a Send key get the lighter chat style, so a quick reply still sounds like you.
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Action Button, Control Center and Shortcuts
Two controls and two Shortcuts actions start a dictation or a session. Put either on the Action Button and Parla is one press away.
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Teach it a name from the phone
Say "The name is …" and the Mac's own recogniser reports how it heard you. Keep that as an alias and the mistake is corrected from then on — with a warning if the alias is an ordinary word.
Not on the App Store
Curious about the keyboard?
Parla for iPhone runs on its author's own phone and Mac, and is not published anywhere. If you would like to know more, say hello.